#WTH In praise of Speaker Mike Johnson

Courage is a rare commodity these days

Apr 18, 2024

Speaker Mike Johnson's Next Challenge | National Review

This week’s podcast covered Iran’s attack on Israel, the progress Russia is making in Ukraine because Kyiv is running low on munitions, and how member states of the axis of evil are learning from each other in preparation for conflict with the United States. We talked to our own Frederick Kagan, and if you haven’t listened, it’s outstanding.

LISTEN

In the substack earlier this week — #WTH Israel has little reason to celebrate — I covered some of our discussion, Iran’s intentions, the imperative for Israel, and more. I also touched on the dysfunction in our government, laying the blame at the feet of the White House and Congress for failing to act in defense of our national security and that of our allies. But on Wednesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson took the bull by the horns and dropped five bills, including critical aid for Ukraine, for Israel, for Taiwan, sanctions on Iran and Russia, a mandate for the Chinese Communist Party to get out of Tiktok, and a border measure.

His announcement that he would move forward with the bills was greeted by the usual know-nothings and members-cum-trolls with a motion to vacate his position in the House and desperate attempts from neo-isolationists in the Senate to derail the bill. Here’s what Johnson said to them:

“This is a critical time right now, a critical time on the world stage. I can make a selfish decision and do something that’s different but I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing.

“I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important. I really do. I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we’ve gotten. I believe Xi, Vladimir Putin and Iran really are an axis of evil. I think they’re in coordination on it.

“So I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Balkans next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.

“To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys. My son is going to begin in the Naval Academy this fall. This is a live-fire exercise for me as it is so many American families. This is not a game, this is not a joke.”

To those who tell me Johnson has taken six months to do the right thing, you’re right. To those who tell me this is on Joe Biden for failing to make a bipartisan case for aid, instead using both Ukraine and Israel as political footballs to propitiate… his aides? Michigan? The Democratic National Committee? Hamas? All of the above, you’re right.

This, as Winston Churchill might have told us — the quote is actually apocryphal —is the American way: “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” Biden’s dithering, consistent slow rolling of weaponry, failure to use drawdown authorities and worse have caused innumerable Ukrainians to die in the face of the Russian onslaught. His equivocation towards Israel has encouraged Hamas and likely cost the lives of hostages. Congress too has been culpable in failing to move bills to help heroic people who have never asked for a boot on the ground, but simply the means to help themselves.

So kudos to a Speaker with the slimmest of majorities, and the President who finally woke up and realized he needed to support the Speaker.

Much can go wrong before the Saturday vote, and it won’t all be GOP clowns either. Democrats were the first to try to bring down the new aid package with demands for more support for Hamas — ie a reversal of the strictures on UNRWA that have already passed the Congress and been signed by Biden. Doubtless the Jew-haters in the Democratic Party — let’s call the squad what they are — and their fellow antisemite, Republican Thomas Massie, will have another shot at bringing down the bills. Nor are the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green and J.D. Vance done.

Let’s hope the forces of good, of patriotism, of freedom prevail. Please do what you can to support your Members of Congress as they fight for what is right.

HIGHLIGHTS

What is important about Iran’s strike on Israel?

FK: I think it's important to look at the Iranian strike package on Israel in the context of the strike packages we've seen the Russians experimenting with against Ukraine. It's hard at this stage of air missile defense to get a lot of missiles and drones and stuff through modern air defenses to their targets. And even in Ukraine, which has had limited numbers of US Patriots and other advanced systems has been able to take down high proportions of Iranian-made Russian-used drones and also some North Korean ballistic missiles as well as Russian ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. And the Ukrainians have, when they have had enough interceptors and systems, they've been fairly successful at intercepting a lot of those.

The Iranians have been watching that. We know that there have been IRGC officers in Russia. We know that the Iranian military is talking to the Russian military all the time. Iranians have been learning lessons. So it's clear that they modeled the strike package on successful Russian strike packages. And the way that you design a strike package like this is you flood the zone with drones and with cruise missiles knowing that most of them are going to be shot down because they're relatively easy to shoot down. Drones are very slow, cruise missiles are relatively slow and you can shoot cruise missiles down from airplanes, among other things. So you expect that most of those will be shot down. But the purpose of those is to distract and overwhelm the air defenders when the ballistic missiles arrive because ballistic missiles are very hard to shoot down. And the Ukrainian shoot-down rates have been very low. And in general terms, shoot-down rates of large ballistic missile salvos are generally low.

So when you look at the strike package, it seems clear to me that the purpose of the package was for the drones and the cruise missiles to overwhelm the Israeli defenders, probably all get shot down, but then that a higher proportion of the ballistic missiles would get through than actually did. I think there are a number of reasons why that didn't happen, and I think it's very dangerous and usually wrong to read into enemy failure the intent to fail. Because here I think there are very straightforward things that I can understand why the Iranians would not have seen how this was actually going to play out.

And very specifically, it's about a thousand kilometers from the Iranian border to Israel, and we and the Israelis used all of that space to have our aircraft, and we had hundreds of aircraft in the air, to chase down and shoot down the cruise missiles in the drones. Okay, well, everybody's known that you can shoot down drones and cruise missiles from aircraft, but no one has seen that scale of effort over that long a distance to shoot down a package of cruise missiles and drones because A, the Ukrainians don't have a thousand kilometers of standoff to do it and B, they don't have a lot of airplanes.

So as an analyst, what seems clear to me is the Iranians expected that a higher proportion than zero of the drones and cruise missiles would make it through to the Israeli defense umbrella where they would distract the Israeli defenses when the ballistic missiles arrived so that a higher proportion of the ballistic missiles get through.

What's a higher proportion? Okay, the Ukrainians have generally been shooting down around 10% of the ballistic missiles that come in. All right, I'm sure the Iranians gave the Israelis credit for having better missile defense, which they do. Let's say that you give them 80%, that's 80% on 120 missiles. There's a big delta between the handful of missiles that got through and the 20 or 30 ballistic missiles that the Iranians I think could reasonably have expected would get through if this strike had worked. And that's still a limited strike, that's still, 20 missiles, it's not hundreds of missiles, although these are pretty big warheads, some of these things. But that's what I think the purpose of and intended effect of this strike was when you look at it in context, and I just think the Iranians underestimated what we and the Israelis would be able to do, which is alarming because now I think they will recalculate and they will learn from this and they will think about how to deal with the problems that defeated them this time.

Many are saying this attempted strike was a big fail for the Iranians. Should the Israelis feel complacent in their air defense capabilities?

FK: I'm alarmed at the complacency with which people are discussing this shootdown, including some senior retired US military officials for whom I have a lot of respect, but who are really talking about this as a vindication of an air and missile defense system. I don't read it that way.

Why should we not be complacent about the strength of Western air and missile defenses?

FK: I've watched the Russians go through many iterations of drone strikes and drone and missile strikes against Ukraine. And for a long time, we watched the Ukrainians shoot down pretty much everything that came in. And the Russians got smart, this is what people don't understand. There are ways of outwitting air defense systems. There are ways of outwitting missile defense systems. There are ways of overloading them. And I've seen some of the tracks that Russian drones follow in Ukraine and the cleverness with which they approach their targets from all directions and the way that they find gaps and seams in the defenses and then take advantage of that. Determined enemies will find ways to identify and strike the vulnerabilities in your defense systems. So we should not be complacent about this.

Meanwhile, the Iranians are also continuing to ramp up their nuclear program. How should we be thinking about a nuclear Iran in the wake of this attack?

FK: What this brings to mind for me, Dany, is this is true in the case of the Middle East and in the case of Europe, we actually have to start thinking about how one would fight a nuclear war again, because in order to do deterrence, you have to be willing to have that conversation about what the nuclear war would look like. And the purpose is not to fight the war, the purpose is to deter it, but that's where we need to be mentally in the Middle East already. And this strike was interesting in that respect, so I'm still not clear on exactly how many ballistic missiles got through it. We saw a report that it was about seven, something like that. Seven out of 120. That gives the Iranian nuclear planners as it were, a basis to begin calculations about what they can expect to get through in a failed strike because this is what nuclear war is all about.

What proportion do you think you'll get through the defenses? Now, is that going to be a good ratio for them? Well, if it were seven and they were all nuclear armed and they hit the targets that they wanted to hit, then right. On the other hand, the Israelis have a lot more than seven nuclear weapons to flip back at the Iranians. The Iranians don't have these kind of missile defenses. That's a bad trade for the Iranians. As we talk about what the long-term deterrence here is talking about improving the quality of this missile defense becomes very important, but really starting to think through, because as you've said to me, rightly, no missile defense is 100% effective, and in principle, the number of acceptable nuclear rounds landing on Israel is zero, so Roger. But we have to play this deterrence game and we have to think about how this all works out, which is the other reason why I think it's important for us not to be complacent.

Should the White House be worried about escalation risks right now?

FK: We do need to get out of the business of going for the Nobel Prize in escalation management all the time and all this hyper-sophisticated calculation, which has got us to a bad place in Ukraine and has gotten us a bad place in the Middle East. This is about deterrence. This is about hard power. This is about demonstrating to our adversaries that we are prepared to take the fight to them if they take the fight to us. And that we're certainly prepared to back our friends and allies who are fighting them and defeating them all the way until our friends and allies actually win. That's the way that you stop this from getting out of hand.

How do you respond to people saying Iran was responding in kind to an Israeli strike on Iran’s embassy in Damascus?

FK: Look, the Israelis killed a senior IRGC general who has been responsible for building and maintaining and running a massive network that has been fueling weapons, proxies, experts, and others who have been attacking Israel on a regular basis, not Iran, but from Lebanon and Syria, and also from Gaza. Zahedi, who was the IRGC general that the Israelis killed, had that portfolio for the entire Levant for the Quds force. This is a guy who was... This is a legitimate military target.

This is a guy who was running a war against Israel, and the Israelis took him out. If you want to talk about who's right and who's wrong, you have to start with, okay, is our position that the Israelis don't have a right to take shots at IRGC officers who are running active military campaigns against Israel? Yeah, they do. Now, if you want to say that the Iranians have a right to respond to that, I can say, okay, if you want to regard this as a war between Israel and Iran, and if your position is neutral in that war, then you can say, well, the Iranians had a cop coming. Personally, I'm not neutral when it's a contest between our allies and our enemies, so I'm not really interested in the Iranian justification for that.

What are Putin’s objectives right now?

FK: Putin has told us what his objectives are, and his objectives include reconstituting some combination of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. The nuance is important because of course, the Russian Empire also included Finland, and most of Poland. And the Russians have been very clear that they're very vague about exactly where they think their borders end. And they've said things like, Russia's borders never end, and so we need to... There is no basis in the Kremlin propaganda to be confident that we know how limited Russian ambitions are when the Russians, in fact, are identifying pretty unlimited ambitions. That's Putin's objective. He says it all the time. He's written it personally multiple times. He articulates it all the time and more importantly than that, he is building it into an ideology in Russia that is now being taken and developed by people who are even crazier than he is, into some really strange places.

That should really worry us because Putin is not going to live forever, which is a good thing. But there is every reason to think that anybody who succeeds him is going to be more aggressive and crazier than he is. And that should really alarm us because Putin is beginning the process of really rearming Russia.

Should we really be worried about Russia when Russian appear so incompetent in Ukraine?

FK: We've watched the Russians be stupid and incompetent in 2022, we watched them take a very long time to learn. They're still tactically incompetent. They still don't look good fighting. But here's where my PhD does come in handy, because of my, a PhD in Soviet military history, and the thing that people don't understand about the Soviets is the Red Army was always tactically incompetent. It didn't get to Berlin simply by steamrolling the Germans with masses of humanity, however. It got to Berlin by being smart at higher levels of war, by designing campaigns that its incompetent soldiers could execute. We never really understood that. We've always had a problem with this. But this is now what we're seeing the Russians doing. The Russians are designing intelligent campaigns that take account of the fact that their soldiers are no good and that take account of Ukrainian weaknesses, and weaknesses and vulnerabilities that are emerging because the United States has suspended aid.

And so, the Russians are going to continue developing in this regard, and they're going to, if... I mean, I'll come back to where the war is at right now. If the Russians win in Ukraine, we're going to find a Russian army on the NATO border from the Black Sea to the Arctic, and that's going to have some pretty devastating consequences for us.

We don't need to worry about defending Romania right now, because their border with Russia's hundreds of miles to the east. We don't need to worry about defending Hungary or Slovakia or Southern Poland for that matter, because those borders are covered by a friendly Ukraine. If the Russians actually win, and we have Russian army along that entire frontier, our defense requirements go up enormously.

What happens if America stops providing aid to Ukraine?

FK: We have the problem that people are talking now about a fictional world in which the United States does not resume providing aid to Ukraine and the front lines remain about where they are. That is a fictional universe. That is not a real option. The Ukrainians are running out of air defenses because we're not giving them more air defense interceptors and systems. They have had to pull all their air defenses back to defend Kyiv and critical infrastructure. So, the Ukrainian frontline troops are almost entirely exposed. For the first time in this war, we're seeing the Russians use tactical aviation to launch thousands of glide bombs on Ukrainian frontline troops and just blow them away. And the basic Russian tactic here is there's a village that the Russians want to move into, they start by obliterating it with glide bombs, so there's nothing for the Ukrainians to defend, then they pound the Ukrainian forces and then they drive forward.

That lack of air defense, which is allowing the Russians to do this, is interacting with the lack of artillery on the Ukrainian side. So, the Ukrainians have been incredibly clever here and the Ukrainians have got this great drone system, and they're working on that, although they don't have money for it now, partly because we haven't provided the aid, which is important. But drones, the drones they have don't kill tanks and they can't kill lots of tanks. If you want to kill lots of tanks, you need artillery. So, the fact that the Ukrainians don't have artillery means that the Russians are able to put armored columns into the field to take advantage of this air bombardment that they're able to do. So, what's happening? The Ukrainians are losing ground all along the line right now. The line is not stalemated, the line is not stable. The Ukrainians are being forced back right now, and they're actually being forced back now and they're in danger of losing, for the first time in a long time, a settlement that actually really matters.

How urgently does Ukraine need renewed U.S. assistance?

FK: If we don't get U.S. military assistance going there soon, Ukrainians are going to lose the limited ability that they have to defend their airspace. They're going to lose even more artillery capability as they fire through the rounds that they have. And by the end of the year, you're going to start to see the front lines crumbling, especially because we know what the Russians are preparing to do.

So, Putin has seen the vulnerability that we have helped create by withholding the aid. Normally at this time of year, the Russians would be in a lower operation tempo period, preparing for a summer offensive. That's not what they're doing. They're leaning all in right now to take advantage of this gap, which I hope will just be a gap in provision of supplies. But they're also preparing for a summer offensive. And the summer offensive that they're preparing for appears to be a ground attack toward Kharkiv city. That could happen late this summer.

Now, there are two scenarios here. If the Ukrainians had the stuff they need to fight, I'm confident they would be able to stop that attack. If we don't give them any aid, I'm not at all confident that they can stop that attack. And Kharkiv is the second-largest city in Ukraine. It's right there near the border. The Ukrainians stopped it before. They stopped that attack in '22, and they stopped it after that. They could stop it again if we gave them what they need. If we don't, though, we're in a whole other world.

So, the forecast cone here is very, very wide, and we are starting to see some very, very dangerous outcomes coming into that forecast cone. And those include the collapse of the Ukrainian line and Russian forces streaming toward the Western border. That can happen later this year, and especially next year, in 2025, if we don't provide any more assistance.

On the other hand, the Russians still suffer from very serious limitations and vulnerabilities. And if we provided the Ukrainians with what they need, the Ukrainians would be able to take advantage of those, they would for sure be able to stop the Russian advances, and they probably would even be able to retake some important ground. It really is up to us, what the outcome of this conflict is going to be in the next year and a half.

What situation will Ukraine be in after the election if we don’t send more aid?

FK: Whoever's president January, 2025 is going to have a terrible situation if aid is not rapidly resumed. It'll be a terrible situation. You're going to have Ukrainian lines collapsing, you're going to have Russian forces driving toward the NATO borders, you're going to have millions of refugees fleeing Ukraine into Europe, you're going to have Ukrainian cities being bombed, and it's just going to get worse. So whoever's president in January, 2025 is going to have to make an immediate decision, and the decision is going to be, "Do I preside over the final collapse of Ukraine, the emergence of the largest insurgency the world has ever seen, and the arrival of Russian forces on the Western NATO border? Or do I turn around and try to find some way desperately to help the Ukrainians stave this off with massive aid packages and so forth?", which it may not be possible to do at that point.

At the same time, by the way, you've got Europeans talking about the stage at which they send their own troops into Ukraine because they do understand the dangers to NATO and Europe of allowing the Russians just to win here. So, there's all kinds of complicated situations that the next president could face right away as the first decisions that he has to make.

Can the U.S. negotiate an end of the Russia-Ukraine war with Putin?

FK: If you want to talk about negotiating with Putin, I have real questions about whether negotiating with his particular dragon is likely to lead positive results, but I'll set those aside for the moment: if you want to talk about that, the next president will have virtually no leverage if aid is not resumed. Putin is basically saying this, by the way, Putin is basically saying he's leaning forward right now because he wants to have the greatest possible leverage and be in a position to dictate terms to the next president, whoever that might be, and that's what's going to happen. If there is no aid, we're not going to have any leverage, and so Putin will dictate terms and we know what the terms are that he will dictate, and they will be catastrophically to our disadvantage.

Did Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan encourage Putin to invade Ukraine?

FK: I've heard a lot of Republicans saying, I think accurately that the catastrophic unnecessary withdrawal from Afghanistan encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine. That's also my assessment. I think that that's true. Okay, the same will hold if Republicans pull the plug on Ukraine for China and Taiwan also for Iran in the Middle East, our enemies are not as sophisticated as we sometimes think they are our enemies. We think often that one party, we can oppose the President, but we can say that we'll be tough when we are in power, and that our enemies will be influenced by that.

The thing is, there's only one United States at a time, and our enemies don't parse things this finely. They look to see, is the United States acting in its interests or not? Is the United States defending its interests in its allies or not? They're not asking questions about, "Well, the Republicans are not doing that right now, but we know that they will when they come into office," that's not the way that people are thinking. And in fact, in this particular case, I think there is something that's even more toxic to our long-term security and safety going on. Think about the precedent that we're actually on the verge of establishing if aid is not resumed the precedent is that regardless of how much it might be in America's interest to support a particular partner or ally or to do something, the opposition party will not support a president of the opposing party. That's the basic principle that we would be establishing here.

Can you be tough on Iran without being tough on Russia or the other way around?

FK: You can't be an Iran hawk and a Russia dove, and you really can't be a Russia hawk and Iran dove either. This is a coalition that is moving close toward being a military alliance. They're using, as we've talked about, the same weapons, the same tactics they're covering for one another. By the way, North Korea is part of that alliance, and we've seen the Russians importantly cover for the North Koreans at the Security Council by blocking the renewal of the monitoring mission for sanctions there. And of course, the Chinese are part of this coalition as well.

These states see themselves in a way that's similar to the way the Axis powers saw themselves in World War II: they had diverging interests, they didn't agree about lots of things, they didn't always coordinate all their activities, but they understood a few things. And one of those things they all noticed was America was an enemy, Britain was an enemy, France was an enemy, and it was in their collective interest for each one of them to do what they could to damage those enemies. That's what this enemy entente that we're facing right now sees, and they're all working together. And this is tragic to me, but the North Koreans and the Iranians are being better allies to the Russians than we are to our partners, and that fact is not being missed in the world. You can't separate these things. We're facing one block of enemies that sees us as the enemy, and we have to resist all of them. Right now, we have the luxury of not doing the fighting ourselves. This is the thing that's most upsetting about the situation that we're in. No one's asking us to fight in Ukraine.

We help defend the Israelis against missile defense, we're trying hard not to get drawn into a war in the Middle East, I'd rather not get drawn into a war in the Middle East, we still have that option. If we show weakness all along the line, and if we allow the Russians to win in Ukraine, if we allow the Iranians to continue to rampage unchecked in the Middle East, we are going to find ourselves having to fight these wars ourselves with our own people. That would be a catastrophic failure of American national security, and I fear that that's where we're headed if we don't help our allies and partners right now carry out the wars that they are currently fighting.

Read the transcript here.