T's and C's apply.

I think there's a sort of worry among some of the primes in NATO countries that Ukraine's going to get their business.

You know, The British, I think, and others are trying to be quite sensible in working as closely as possible with Ukraine.

And in return, Britain has given Ukraine details of how to build storm shadows and so on.

So there's quite a lot of useful cooperation there.

In general, I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly innovative.

I mean, extraordinarily innovative in their drone technology.

You put the brakes on.

The art of the deal?

It's not about the military sphere at all.

But the origin of the word is military.

And if you look right through the 19th century, strategy, John Minney called it war on the map, was about how to get your forces into position to fight the battle.

When the battle began, that was tactics.

I mean, that was essentially what it was about.

The problem with that... was, as became increasingly evident late in the 19th century, was It's fine if you thought that everything could be decided by a single battle or a series of battles.

Lawrence, do you think that Trump has caused significant, if not irreversible damage to the Western Alliance generally? Do you think that there's going to be a time at which, you know, Trump goes either through natural means or political means and we all go back to where we were before Trump 45? Or are those days completely over because now the trust has been broken?

What, what are you looking for here? What is your kind of theory of how, how this might, uh, proceed if you're trying to be optimistic from a Ukrainian perspective? And is that the kind of best theory of victory that we can come up with for the Ukrainians at this point?

Yeah, I mean, the, the term hurting stalemate is not mine.

But the basic idea that, that, that it's not clear how either side wins in the way it wants to win, and they're both hurting in the process, that's true.

So I think one of the f- first things I wrote on the, um, full-scale invasion, not for my Substack, not for you, was, uh, I said this is a war Putin can't win because I just couldn't see how he could occupy and subjugate all of Ukraine, and that remains the case.

And it's still the case that even if he achieved the immediate military objectives, you have to wonder what sort of prize the Donbas is now.

I mean, it, it, it's been ruined by the war, uh, by the aggression.

But Putin believes somehow that this is, um, this is a thing that he has to win because failure to do so will undermine the credibility of him as a leader.

What do you think that will mean in terms of the, the, the role of nuclear weapons?

But do you think there is any chance that there could be a pause in this war at some point in the near future, perhaps towards the end of this year or beginning of next year?

Well, I mean, a number of people have, have now put the point to Putin.

Uh, I mean, it's a very strange situation.

I mean, the issue's normally between a ceasefire and a peace settlement.

The peace settlement is very difficult because there are numerous issues that have to be addressed.

Peace settlements are never negotiated quickly, and ceasefires seem quite simple, but they're actually quite difficult.

Where actually is the line of contact at the moment? You can imagine all sorts of arguments if you try to draw the line a- as to the, where there's Russians on the one side and Ukrainians on the other, 'cause a lot places they're intermingled.

Laurie, to, to finish up, I want to ask you as a historian, and of course we have history in the making here, how do you assess Zelenskyy's wartime leadership so far?

What were you working on? What drew you into setting up the British Foreign Policy Project, and what was the mood like in that period?

So the job was advertised, and I was encouraged to apply.

I was at, uh, IISS at the time working on a history of nuclear strategy, which I carried on working on all the time I was here, and what attracted me was first that this seemed a slightly more secure job than the one I had.

Secondly, I'd worked for my PhD and at IISS largely on American and nuclear issues, and I wanted to broaden it a bit.

Also, the deputy director at Chatham House at the time was Ian Smart, who had been at IISS, who I knew and admired, and I thought it would be fun working with him, so I applied.

As far as I am aware, I gave a pretty poor interview, but they decided on me nonetheless.

The other member of the team, there were only two of us, was Josie Statler, and she'd already been appointed, and she really handled the administrative side, which was quite heavy, of the project.

Mm

Where do you assess the state of the conflict right now?

I'm reasonably positive about where it's gone, but I think the problem for anybody who follows this war is you're almost scared of optimism.

You know, we've been here before when, especially at times during 2022 when the, when the Russians really seemed to have screwed things up and were on the run, and they recovered.

And then there was a counteroffensive, which didn't work out so well.

So it's been, since 2023, I think it's been a pretty tough time.

The Ukrainians have hung on, but the sort of optimism that led you to think that they could really push the Russians back has been in pretty short supply.

What I think has happened, really over the last six months, is a number of things have come together, and they weren't wholly unanticipated.

So essentially, could you explain your thinking here? Is this strategy really for Ukraine going forward, and how, uh, will it impact our overall understanding of the war?

First of all, before we get into your book and the essays that you've written on Ukraine, I have to ask, what's your strategic assessment of where we are in the war in Ukraine as 2026 properly gets going?

So until a few weeks ago, you'd have simply said in a far better place than at a similar time in 2025.

I think the Ukrainians have held back a sustained Russian offensive that's actually been going for well over two years now.

The-- They denied Russia major gains.

Russia did advance, but not sufficient to breach Putin's basic objectives, which is to show that he can control Donetsk, uh, even if the Ukrainians don't hand it over.

I think the negotiation trackers was coming to an end or, or was petering out.

But what's changed over the past year is that the US doesn't have that much leverage over Ukraine anymore 'cause it provided with so little, which is a bad thing.

Perhaps you can just unpack for us what you think the defining error was.

W- what, what do you make of that as a strategy for this fighting?

I think it was, to be honest, more of a pretext than the basic strategy.

You will recall last June, uh, the United States claimed to have, uh, removed the bulk of, uh, Iran's ability to enrich its uranium.

Uh, and indeed in his opening announcement, President Trump said it had been obliterated.

Uh, and also Witkoff's account does not accord with other accounts of these talks.

Um, so there were issues about uranium enrichment.

There are issues about the, um, the amount of en- already enriched uranium, um, that nobody quite knows where it is, but suspects is buried deep in, in one of the facilities that was b- uh, bombed last June.

So, so what do you think this instability then means, really? What, what will be the, the long-term effect, and what, or what should the strategy be, uh, to make sure that that instability does not break apart a-alliances and cause more damage?

I'm wondering, there are obviously a lot of dissimilarities, but I'm wondering what lessons you think America, and I suppose to a lesser extent the UK, have learned from Iraq in terms of the prosecution of this war.

[chuckles] The easiest answer is none, I think.

I mean, when we started the Iraq inquiry, I was kept on being asked about lessons and, you know, the obvious one is don't do it again, or at least think through what you're going to do.

The long haul is the key issue.

And I think this is-- I mean, this is different in a number of ways from Iraq two thousand and three.

You can point to similarities in how it came about, but it's different.

One of the big differences is that the administration does not want to send ground forces.

I- if that is true, how do Britain and other Western allies in that position navigate this new world?

With her blue suits, pearls, and resolute poise, she has already won a reputation for steely conviction, promising tough economic reforms and a firm hand against strikes and public unrest.

When the Thatcher government came in in 1979, the Foreign Office managed to persuade them that it was probably unwise to leave this too long and should try and do a deal.

And they did agree a sort of deal with the junta, which involved leaseback.

That is, the British would transfer sovereignty, but then sort of lease the islands back so that the population could carry on as they were.

And this seemed sensible enough, but there were obvious problems.

First, how long would the leaseback be? Secondly, could Argentina put its own people on the islands as the freeholder? And third, what about the wishes of the islanders, going back to the 1968 commitment? So what happened was that the minister in charge in the Foreign Office, Nicholas Ridley, went to the Falklands in late 1980 and was somehow trying to convince the islanders that it would be their idea to go for leaseback, and they weren't at all convinced.

And even less so was the Commons convinced when Ridley came back and tried to explain what he was up to.

Galtieri and Anaya believe that in the current circumstances, their plan to retrieve the Falklands could be achievable.

Do you, Lawrence, when you look at Reagan in total, when you look at his contribution in total, does it fit into earlier American presidents a kind of sense for you of strands of American foreign policy? How, how radical is it? Was it?

it?I think at the time it was seen to be very radical in terms of the tendency in the East-West relations, if you like, since the early sixties.

That is, it was quite a sharp break.

Now in retrospect, first, in a way, he was vindicated by the end of the Soviet Union, and one could debate how much he was responsible for that, po-possibly not as much as his supporters claim.

But he, he saw the way things were going when his advisors were assuming that the Soviet Union was there forever, and its influence would be there forever.

His two terms are very different as well on this same issue, because he started off with, with apparently very belligerent rhetoric, and then in the second term was the one who became pally with Gorbachev, had this extraordinary summit in, uh, nineteen eighty-six in, in which the two of them almost agreed to full nuclear disarmament.

So he ended up looking more, much more like a peacemaker than he did when he started.

They're actually all doing the same thing, but Donald Trump is honest about it, and Reagan maybe was less so.

Can you help us understand why we talk about a new world order, the rules gone? Why is it all happening, Sir Lawrence?

So all of these things have got their own trajectories.

They're coming together.

I mean, the Ukraine situation is more or less as it was all of last year, with Russia pushing on, but only making slow progress at high cost and regularly battering Ukrainian cities.

There's nothing new there.

and the peace initiative there more or less coming to a conclusion.

The Venezuelan situation has been there for a while.

So how do you account for the Trump factor versus the power of these long term trends?

But Lawrence, do you think we should have all seen this coming?

Well, we should have seen it in one sense, that the buildup was pretty clear and the pressure was pretty clear leading up to the 3rd of January.

You're never quite sure what they have in mind.

So it's not so much the fact of going after Venezuela, but the way it was done.

And you've got this strange combination.

On the one hand, a pretty cleverly executed mission to take out and extricate to the U.S., Mr. and Mrs. Maduro.

And you can do that on the basis of the Department of Justice indictments and so on.

So is it a shift of posture and approach or is it a more tactical thing, would you say?

It- i- in a nutshell, um, Trump has sort of simultaneously realized that Putin has been playing him all along and doesn't really have an exit strategy from- from that continuing con.

Yeah, well, he realizes that he's been played along, and then each time he hears something which gives him hope, um, he- he act as if there is a real prospect of some sort of deal.

Um, and I think the- the- the heart of this story is the fact that he uses this chap Steve Witkoff as his main negotiator, not only on this, but on Iran and Gaza and so on.

Um, and he's not very good at it.

Uh, he's not a diplomat.

He doesn't, um, always understand what he's heard.

So that, in this particular case, first he thought that Putin had agreed to meet with Zelenskyy, uh, as well as Trump-

Mm-hmm.