Nato Summit

Floor Speech

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Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, if you are like me, a Member of the Senate in the hallways this week, I think the two questions that have come up over and over again were about the NATO meeting that just transpired in the last couple of days and the upcoming meeting on Monday between Vladimir Putin and President Trump.

I had intended to come to the floor and speak about policies toward China on trade. There is a lot to cover.

There was an article this morning in the Associated Press about how the Chinese Government has turned the American business class into lobbyists. They are basically telling these guys that are doing business in China: You should go back to Washington and lobby your government to stop imposing tariffs on us or you guys are going to pay a price. But I will have time to talk about that next week. That was really my intent.

I want to focus on the meeting on Monday between President Trump and Vladimir Putin because there is a lot of hyperbole. Someone came up and asked: Are you concerned that the President will meet one-on-one with Vladimir Putin and nobody else in the room?

I said: First of all, I guarantee someone else will be in the room because Putin doesn't speak English and President Trump doesn't speak Russian. It will not be a productive meeting if one or two other people aren't there. That should be the least we should focus on.

We should take this stuff seriously. It is an important and serious meeting. I don't take a back seat to anyone in terms of being clear- eyed about Vladimir Putin, and I want to talk about that today a little bit.

I want to start out by saying: Let's all take a deep breath and be reasonable. It is not unusual for the President of the United States to meet with the President of Russia because, of the 16,000 nuclear weapons on this planet, 90 percent of them are possessed by these two countries--almost equally divided. This is the reason other Presidents have met with President Putin or whoever the leader is of the Russian Federation. And that is why those meetings are important and will continue.

That said, it is important--when we analyze these meetings, what we hope they are about, and what we hope they will produce--to understand not just who you are meeting with and what they do but to understand why they are doing it. If you do not understand what the other side wants and what motivates them, then the meetings are not nearly as productive, and neither is our analysis or the suggestions we make about our policy toward that country.

First is understanding Vladimir Putin. I have never met the man. I don't think you need to meet him to believe a couple of things about him. First, is he is a very suspicious human being himself--suspicious of others. I think his KGB background has probably influenced that. He also grew up in the Cold War in Russia in the Soviet Union when Russians didn't even trust each other.

Imagine growing up in a society where people spy on each other, and you don't know, if you say something to your friend in school, if he will report you to the authorities--not to mention the authorities themselves looking at you all of the time. Then imagine actually being a product of their intelligence services.

I think when you grow up in that era, in a place like that, you are naturally going to be suspicious of other people, and you are going to ascribe to them attributes. So that is the first thing.

By the way, I think that also informs his view of the United States. It is impossible, I believe, for someone like this to grow up in that era, in that place, working where he did, and not have deep suspicions and views--negative views--about the United States and the West at- large.

The second thing that is pretty apparent just by watching him, is this guy is competitive. He views everything as a personal thing. Personal-level dominance is important to him, but, more importantly, his relationship with the United States is a competitive one. I think, by and large, he views the world as a zero-sum game, but he most certainly views the relationship between the United States and Russia as a zero-sum game--meaning that in any sort of interaction we are having with Vladimir Putin, there is no scenario in which he envisions that we both do well. He believes there is only so much success in the world, and the more we have of it, the less he has of it. I do believe it informs all the decisions he makes. There can be only one winner.

I think he is also deeply driven by his personal image. I will tell you that he probably wouldn't last 2 weeks in American politics where people are habitually mocked, and if you run for public office or you are a public figure--whether it is social media or the like--everyone gets ridiculed, mocked, and attacked. I am not sure he could ever put up with that sort of scrutiny. He is probably sensitive about it.

The one thing you can tell by watching him is that this is a person who works very hard to control his emotions. He never wants to look angry. He never wants to look as though he is afraid of something or worried about anything. He never wants to look as though he is in doubt about anything. He is very image-driven, and that drives a lot about how he controls his emotions.

But the other thing that I think is common sense is, if you grew up as a spy in the KGB, you know how valuable personal information is and how personal information about you can be weaponized. So that is why we know very little about him as a person--his personal life, his health, or any of these things. You would never know about it other than what he allows us to see--photos of him on a horse without his shirt on or whatever else he wants to show us that day--because he wants to control the personal information that is available.

He also wants to be able to control how his image is portrayed. The image he wants to portray is twofold. No. 1, he wants an image that portrays Vladimir Putin as an important world leader, an indispensable world leader; he is the guy that matters, and in every major crisis on this planet, he is a person whose opinion, views, and positions have to be taken into account. That drives a lot of the decisions he makes. It is the reason they are in Libya right now. It is the reason they are in Afghanistan right now. It is the reason he is trying to figure out how he can finagle his way into the talks with North Korea. It is because he wants to be an indispensable world leader, and there should not be any major discussion on the planet that he is not in the middle of. So oftentimes he injects himself into these things for that reason.

That is tied to his second end goal, and that is the one that drives most of what he does. He wants to restore Russia as a great world power, equal to the United States of America. He cannot do that economically. The Russian economy's GDP is $2 trillion, which makes it roughly the size of some of our States here in the United States and also roughly the size of Italy, Spain, and other countries. So he is not an economic superpower; therefore, he can only be an asymmetrical superpower, meaning the use of things that are not traditional, such as cyber warfare, his role on the security council, and the military--the ability to project power and to threaten with nuclear weapons and also with their conventional capabilities to invade neighboring countries or to intervene in places like Syria.

Ultimately, what drives him most of all--in addition to being, personally, an indispensable leader--is that he wants Russia and the United States to be viewed as equal powers on the world stage.

I think it is pretty clear from what he has said publicly that he views the 1990s as an era of humiliation for Russia. He looks at the end of the Cold War until the time he took over just in the last few years, and he sees that Russia was weak and America was strong, and we were preying on a weak Russia.

By the way, that is probably how he views the world. He views the world as a zero-sum game, a place where the weak are preyed on by the strong. Therefore, they must be strong, and they must be seen as equal to us.

Understanding all of that and any interaction with him is critical to having a positive, productive, or, at a minimum, not damaging interaction. If we go in with any illusions that this is, somehow, someone who, if we just get along with him better or if we work on some things together, then he is going to change behavior and be less problematic, that is a fool's errand. At the end of the day, if you believe the world is a zero-sum game and if you believe that the competition between the United States and Russia is one in which every time we win, they lose, and vice versa, then it is going to be very hard to find areas of interest that we can truly work on for the mutual benefit of both countries.

That does not mean that you are unnecessarily antagonistic. The bottom line is that the United States is both economically, militarily, and diplomatically superior to the Russian Federation Government in terms of our influence and our ability to do things in the world. When you are stronger--not an image, necessarily, but in reality--it should give you a level of security to be able to figure out ways in which we can work on things that are good for our country but also not lose the wisdom of understanding that you can often fall into traps. What we do not want is to fall into traps.

By the way, on this whole point of strong versus weak, I know a number of my colleagues had the opportunity to travel to Moscow during the last recess. It is interesting how it was covered in the American media--how they portrayed the visit--and how the Russian media portrayed it. I know many of them are frustrated by this. The Russian media basically portrayed them--again, it is state-controlled media, so they are going to portray it any way they want. But they almost made it look as though weaklings from America had gone over there. They were very frustrated by this. It just tells you--it gives you insight into the way they view things in the world. That is why you will very rarely see an interaction that they couch as a meeting that is respectful. They always want to put Putin in a dominant position, and they always want to put Russia in a dominant position.

By the way, one of the tactics Putin uses to accomplish this is before meetings even happen, he announces ahead of time that a deal has been struck, almost as if to trap you into the deal. Obviously, since he is announcing the deal, it sounds as if it is something he came up with.

All of these are interesting points, but where do these conversations lead us? There are a few things I think we need to keep in mind. The first is invitations to work together. They will probably happen, and he will probably announce them before the visit. One, he will say: Why don't we work together on counterterrorism? A lot of people would say: Well, that makes a lot of sense. They don't like the terrorists; we don't like the terrorists. So why can't we work with Putin to go after the terrorists?

Ideally, the answer would be: Yes, we have strong disagreements about a lot of things. Whether it is an ISIS element or an al-Qaida element, if we have a chance to work together on it, then we should pursue it.

There is a problem, though, and this what I hope everyone is clear- eyed about. They are not very good counterterrorism partners. To begin with, their capabilities are just not very good. We have seen that in Syria. They are not targeting terrorists. They are bombing schools and hospitals, and they are--not only have they committed war crimes, but they have assisted Assad in committing war crimes.

If you were going after terrorists, you would go to the places where the terrorists are. For much of that conflict, they have largely spent their time going after nonterrorist rebels--or at least non-al-Qaida, non-ISIS rebels. They are going after those rebels instead. So they are not very good at counterterrorism. They are not very capable.

The other thing is they use that as an opportunity to spy on us. When you are cooperating together militarily, you are embedded alongside each other and sharing information, so that gives you a lot of opportunity to spy on the people you are working with. We need to be wary of that.

Any effort to work together on counterterrorism has to be real. It has to be truly about terrorists, and it has to protect the United States and our information.

The second thing they love to talk about is: Well, why don't we work together on arms control? There are two problems with arms control. It sounds good on paper. The first is they cheat and they violate it. They deny it, but they violate it. The other is that they are for arms control as long as the arms that are being controlled are the ones we have more of or as long as the arms that are being controlled are the ones we are technologically superior in. They seek to use that as an advantage.

It is difficult because if you go out and you talk to people and say ``Hey, the Russians want to work together on arms control,'' everyone says ``Well, that is a great idea.''

I understand. It sounds very good on paper, but the reality of arms control is something very different. It means this: We are going to look for opportunities to cheat on our end, and we are going to try to strictly enforce it on your end.

Remember, it is a zero-sum game. If they enter into a counterterrorism relationship with us, it will be one in which they win and we lose because Vladimir Putin does not foresee a cooperative agreement with anyone, especially the country he is in direct competition with.

If it is an arms reduction agreement, remember, it is a zero-sum game. He is motivated by the desire to win at our expense, and he will use arms control as an opportunity to do that if he can structure it appropriately.

The other thing we hear him talk about is cyber. People chuckle about that. Imagine a cyber deal with the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin. But, again, Vladimir Putin knows that the U.S. private sector and government have cyber capabilities that are superior to his. So if he could come up with some sort of cyber agreement that would create rules which take away our advantage but allow him to continue to cheat and deny they are cheating--zero-sum game--he would be able to jump on top of us. These are things we want to keep an eye on.

The other thing to keep an eye on moving forward in this relationship is the unexpected. One of the things you have seen in his behavior and the zero-sum game sort of analysis of our relationship with them is that any time he sees an opportunity to do something because we are distracted or because the world may not act, he takes advantage of it: 2007 in Georgia; 2013 and 2014 in Ukraine. We could see the Ukrainian hostilities resume. The world is focused on North Korea. We are focused on the arguments regarding NATO. We are focused on the trade situation with China, Canada, Mexico, and everyone else. Everyone is talking about something different, and Ukraine is falling off the headlines.

You could wake up one morning and all of a sudden realize that hostilities have resumed or maybe it will be a massive cyber attack. Maybe it will be ramping up their involvement in places such as Libya or Afghanistan or one morning we will wake up and realize they have deployed significant military assets to one of those two countries--or both, for that matter.

It would be very reminiscent of what we saw him do in Syria, when he saw the--and the excuses would be: The Russians were already there. We are working with the government. They have invited us to come in and bring more people to help them. You would have to foresee that.

The one thing I think we should anticipate Putin will push very strongly on is to get the United States to completely pull out of Syria. What he ideally, probably, wants is some sort of ``international process'' to resolve it but an international process in which Russia not only is a key player, but they get to stay in Syria; they get to keep their naval base; they get to keep their air assets; they get to keep a unified government in Syria that is friendly to them, all supervised by the international community. But the United States has to leave first.

He would love nothing more than an opportunity to set up that sort of scenario because in a zero-sum game situation, he foresees a world in the next 5 years in which Russia has significant military and other assets in Syria permanently, potentially in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and all of a sudden, the countries in the Middle East are saying to themselves: You know, Russia's Vladimir Putin is a guy who can be an interlocutor, a mediator of the disputes in this region. This is a person we should be working with. This is a person who actually is more reliable to work with in the Middle East. He would love nothing more than that, and he would be able to do it without committing 100,000 troops or 50,000 troops or a large loss of Russian personnel. It is a zero-sum game, great power politics, the notion that he wants to be equal to the United States.

Imagine if he could create a scenario in which--if he hasn't done so already--Russia and the Middle East, under Vladimir Putin, are at least as important as, if not potentially more important than, the United States, a situation in which they have permanent military assets and a friendly regime in Syria, potentially in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and other places, and the United States is pulling out of Syria, being forced to reduce its presence in Iraq and in other places. They become de facto more important in the Middle East, and he takes one step toward achieving the goal of reaching parity with the United States of America as far as being an influential global power.

By the way, these efforts to increase their influence would not be limited just to the Middle East. You could foresee them doing this in the Western Hemisphere. I read an article a few days ago. It was a big fanfare. They opened up what they call a counterdrug school in Nicaragua. I can only tell you that while it may very well be called a counterdrug school, anytime a country welcomes an unlimited number of Russian military personnel and others, they are welcoming in spies and influence agents and the ability to project power. They have long wanted permanent--or at least semipermanent--basing opportunities in the Western Hemisphere like those they had during the Cold War.

They already have intelligence facilities. They already have a presence in Cuba. They would love nothing more than to get into a place or to expand their presence in a place like Nicaragua and even potentially Venezuela, for that matter. We need to keep an eye on all of these things.

This is an important conversation, but it oftentimes gets lost in all of the rhetoric that is going on around the elections and American politics. We have to understand very clearly that we are not dealing with Belgium here. We are dealing with Vladimir Putin, who has used the world as a zero-sum game, the strong versus the weak, and who is trying to position Russia and himself as the strong versus others whom he hopes he can weaken.

There is no interaction between us and them in which he does not want to come out ahead. He does not feel there is such a thing as a mutually good deal. The only good deals for him are deals in which they win and whomever he is dealing with loses, especially if it is the United States.

I will wrap up by saying that, with all of this in mind, I would not diminish the threat that Russia continues to pose to our electoral system, to our society, and to our politics. The No. 1 objective of Russian efforts in 2016--and it would be their No. 1 objective moving forward--is encouraging infighting in our politics. They have a clear understanding of American politics and its nuances--our societal divisions, the things we like to fight over, how we fight over them, and where we fight over them, and they have figured out and have gotten even better at being able to drive those narratives.

When people ask ``What was the real goal of those efforts in 2016?'' beyond anything else, it was not electing one person or another. His No. 1 objective--No. 1 objective--was to leave a country, the United States, deeply divided, at each other's throats, constantly fighting. No matter who won that election, that is the result he wanted, and that was the result we were going to get. Those efforts continue.

The second effort that I think they have as a priority, by the way, is to create pro-Russia constituencies in the United States. What I mean by that is there are people in American politics who actually take the Russian side or the Putin side of a debate. You have already seen the early phases of that in some places. It is still a minority thought process, but it is not unusual in many cases these days because it has gotten wrapped up in other things that are going on.

It is not outside the realm of the possible that you could see the growth of some pro-Putin element. It is maybe not like what you see in Europe or in Russian-speaking parts of Europe--but some pro-Russian types of constituencies in the United States. Whether that is somehow wrapped up around partisanship or the like, these remain their goals. Remember what I told you earlier. They cannot compete with us economically, but if they can divide us from within, it weakens us, at least in his mind. It is one of the things he can point to and say: Look how weak America is. All they do is fight with each other. Their democracy is a fraud, and look how strong we are because there is no dissent, there is no infighting going on in my Russia.

Obviously, what he doesn't tell you is that whoever fights against him winds up dead or in jail and that there is no press by which people can fight with him anyway. So these are the things to keep in mind as we move forward because the tools that remain at his disposal are still very significant. For example, I could foresee the time or day where--a lot of times there is a lot of focus in America about what if they go into the ballot box and change the votes. That is probably much harder to do because of the way we conduct elections in this country--so decentralized.

Here is what a cyber actor could do. They could change party registration. They could go into the database and suddenly erase a bunch of voters. Imagine if they do so by being able to use analyticals to identify here are the people in this town who we think are likely to vote for this candidate or that candidate. We are going to knock out a bunch of them so that on election day, a bunch of people who support certain candidates go vote, and they are told they are not registered. If you get enough people to do that and enough of those people complain to the press, we are going to see stories saying: Guess what. Supporters of candidate X or Y were not allowed to vote in the election. Fraud. Democracy is dead. We could foresee that at some point in the future. It is a real threat.

We could see Vladimir Putin taking the next step and doing here what he has done in parts of Europe; that is, creating an enemies list, politicians he believes are anti-Russia and targeting those individuals, targeting them with information he steals by hacking their emails, disclosing documents, even doctoring fake documents; perhaps doing something like deepfake, which is something we will be talking a lot about next week. That basically is off-the-shelf technology you can buy right now where you can produce a video that without the proper technology, you could not tell it is fake, where a person is saying something they never said or is doing something they didn't do--a doctored video that looks real. Imagine that, on the eve of an election, a video pops up online--and the media starts to report it--of a candidate saying something offensive they never said or taking a bribe because of a doctored video that looks real, and unless you are a technical expert, you can't tell. It is called a deepfake. They are not that hard to make, and they are not that hard to make for someone with off-the-shelf technology.

Imagine if a nation state decides to use it. You could foresee them targeting specifics races.

They have, as I said, a pretty good understanding of American politics. You could foresee where they would say: There is a congressional race or a Governor's race or a Senate race somewhere in the country that is going to be a really big deal. It has an outsized influence on American politics, and that is the race we are going to interfere in. We are going to do something to impact the outcome of it because we think that will further our narrative one way or the other.

We have to be clear-eyed on all of these things as we go into this.

I would say, perhaps, the greatest goal Vladimir Putin would have in the short term is weakening NATO, not just limiting its expansion but weakening its resolve. NATO, at the end of the day, beyond military hardware that is a part of it, is no better than the true commitment of a nation to a member of NATO to live up to the organizing documents and commitments we make to one another; meaning that we have a commitment, along with our partners in NATO, that if one of us is attacked, we have all been attacked. That has only been invoked one time in its history, and that was after September 11, 2001.

If he somehow could not just keep us from expanding NATO but begin to undermine it from within, it would be an enormous victory because, again, for him, it would be a sign that America is diminishing, that the threats against him are diminishing, and his influence and Russia's role in the world has increased.

So this is an important meeting. It probably will not be the last time they meet, but more important than the meeting are the issues at play between the leader in Russia who views everything as a zero-sum game, in which either he wins or America wins, but it can't be mutually beneficial.

We have to deal with him. He possesses a significant percentage of the world's nuclear weapons. Between the United States and Russia, we have 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons in these two countries. We do have to talk to him, but we need to be very clear-eyed; that is, that it is a complicated but important relationship, and we should clearly understand what motivates him and what motivates his decision making and what their ultimate goals are in any conversation we have.

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