Our 1939 moment: Will we fight for the free world again? | Jim Sciutto | TEDxMidAtlantic

0:00 Transcriber: Anton Zamaraev Reviewer: Manlin Fang I want to begin with a question. What kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want your children to live in, your grandchildren to live in? And what kind of rules do you want that world to go by? I would argue that today the world, and we have agency in this, by the way, are facing a choice for the kind of world we want to live in, to stand for.

0:46 It’s not unlike a choice faced 80 years ago. In this moment, we commemorated the D-Day landings, the soldiers, men and women, who stormed the shore there to fight Nazi Germany. The choice they faced was similar to the one we faced today. The choice between freedom and the lack of freedom. The choice between freedom and tyranny. They made their choice, often at great sacrifice. And it’s a choice that we, today, still celebrate in the movies, there seems to be a new one every year And that we remain grateful for it, even if we don’t know it. Because the world we live in today is shaped in many ways, many positive ways, by the choice that they made then,

1:32 again, at great risk and sacrifice. The choice we’re facing today became clear to me in February 2022, when I found myself in Ukraine in the hours and days and weeks leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In those hours, just before the Russian tanks came across the border and the first Russian cruise missiles started landing on Ukrainian cities, some of them flying over my head. The amazing thing about a cruise missile it kind of moves slowly You could see it going through the sky before it hits its target, and as you watch it, you wonder where it's going to land. So, many of them have landed since then, and so many have lost their lives as a result.

2:18 In the hours before the invasion, I got two phone calls. One, I was still in Kyiv at the time, and I got a call from a member of Congress who I’ve known for a number of years. It was about 3:00 in the morning. He woke me up. You tend to answer those calls in the middle of the night. And he said, “Jim, are you ready?” And I said, “I think I’m ready.” I've been covering this for weeks and months leading up to this. We knew and believed that the invasion was coming. We had seen the satellite images of the tanks massed on the border And he said, “No. Do you know how hard they’re going to hit where you are?” “Are you ready? Are you and your colleagues ready?” And I said, “Well, let me check.” Called my boss. We had a long conversation with CNN security at the time, just to make sure we had everything in place, for the moment.

3:04 The bombs started falling and the tanks started rolling across the border, and the troops as well. I got another call in those hours leading up to the invasion from one of my closest military sources, who’s become a good friend of mine. And he said, “Hey, where are you, guys, in Kyiv right now?” And I said, “Well, we’re at the Intercontinental Hotel.” This is a favorite hotel for journalists in Ukraine still to this day and at that time. And he said, “You’ve let the Russians know, right?” “That’s where you are. And you do.” There are ways to communicate that so that they know where the journalists are. The trouble with the Intercontinental Hotel is where it’s in Kyiv. It’s right between the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry and the headquarters of the national police, right across the street. You could see it from the roof.

3:50 And as my friend reminded me at the time, he’s like, “They may know you’re there and they may not want to hit you, but remember, the Russians don’t have very good aim. But we stayed. It was an important story to cover. As I was there, I took this video from the roof of our hotel. These were the air raid sirens in one of the first strikes at the start of the invasion. I took that video in color, but I turned it to black-and-white because it struck me that, that video in black-and-white could have been borrowed from a newsreel 80 years, 83 years before, in 1939. And as I was watching and reporting on these events unfolding, it struck me that I was living through a moment I thought we'd left behind.

4:39 I was living through Ukraine was living through, and we were living through a 1939 moment. A leader in Europe who imagined he could redraw the maps of Europe by force alone. It was a 1939 moment, but also a 1939 choice. How would we react? Would we let that happen? Say, the costs of standing up to it are too high. Or would we stand up for what we believe in, for the life we’ve come to enjoy? It wasn't entirely a surprise to me. I’d been reporting on and writing on the deterioration in relationships between Russia and the West for a number of years. Russia's increasing aggression in Europe. I’d called it The Shadow War because, in my view,

5:24 Russia was already fighting a war against the West, but below the threshold of open conflict, in the shadows. ‘Little green men’ popping up in Ukraine, for instance, cyber-attacks, etc.,, but as those bombs started falling, it struck me [that] the war was very much out of the shadows, and we had a clean break with the period of 30-some-odd years we’d enjoyed since the end of the last Cold War, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The truth is, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. This is me in Ukraine in 2014. That was the time of Russia's first invasion of Ukraine, when it sliced off a piece of eastern Ukraine and Crimea. There I’m in eastern Ukraine, where they had run elections to choose their representatives.

6:10 And the people in this district had voted for pro-Western candidates, pro-Ukrainian candidates. Russia didn’t like the result. So, they sent the stormtroopers in and they burned the ballots. Burned the ballots that had already been filled out. We also saw how far Russia was willing to go to impose its will on Ukraine. These are the faces of demonstrators who had peacefully come together in the Maidan, the central square of Kyiv, in 2014, to demonstrate for a freer Ukraine, free of Russian influence. Russia’s response was to put snipers on the roofs of buildings around that square and pick them off one by one. And to this day there are pictures in the Maidan. But you can go back even further. Let's go back to 2006. I don't know how many folks might remember this man.

6:57 This was him in his final days. Alexander Litvinenko, who had the nerve to stand up to Putin. A Russian national went to London to find asylum. He wrote books and articles about the tyranny of Putin. Putin responded by poisoning him with the most radioactive substance we know in the world, Polonium. Did it in a cup of tea at a cafe just down the street from the US Embassy in London. Now, I was in London at the time for ABC News, and I covered the story, and after visiting a number of the sites where Litvinenko had visited, including that cafe where he got that radioactive tea. It happens not just in the movies. The security for ABC said to me, “You know what?” “You might want to get yourself tested” “because this stuff is pretty darn radioactive.” And a whole host of people had been contaminated

7:43 from what had been used to kill him. The trouble was, I was going to get married in a few weeks, so I had to take a radiation test a couple of weeks before our wedding in New York. Thankfully, the test was negative and we were able to walk down the aisle. By the way, my wife is here with our three kids, somewhere. There were warning signs even earlier as well. In 2004. Viktor Yushchenko, he had the nerve to challenge Russia’s pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine. Russia’s response was to poison him with dioxin. He survived, but that’s the change he suffered. Again, a leader willing to redraw the maps of Europe by force and to poison, kill and imprison anyone who stood in his way. Think of Alexei Navalny.

8:30 It continues to this day. Now, the difference in this new Cold War that we’re facing now from the last one is that not only are we facing one superpower rival, we’re facing two. XI and Putin, Russia and China. It’s no coincidence that just weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they announced with great fanfare, a no-limits partnership. And we’ve seen that no-limits partnership follow through in the months and years since, with China providing an enormous amount of support for Russia in Ukraine. It has also raised the issue that I hear wherever I go that wherever I go when covering this story. I hear it in Ukraine, I hear it in Europe, I hear it in the States, and I hear it in Asia. And that is that the next target

9:15 and therefore the next test of this choice that we’re facing right now is in a place called Taiwan. I went there last year, and these are exercises that they run there to prepare for a potential Chinese invasion. They take it very seriously. Not a theoretical threat, but a very real threat. The Navy takes it seriously. The Air Force there takes it seriously as well. Soon after we took this photo with all the smiles at Magong Air Base in the Penghu Islands, which are in the Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and China, they got a notice that they had to scramble because Chinese jets were in their airspace. So, that turned out to be a photo op and some interviews. I watched them scramble their jets to respond to China testing their limits.

10:06 Everyone I talked to says China is watching Russia’s experience in Ukraine to see what it could get away with in Asia. The tests are all around us. As with Russia, there have been warning signs. This is me in a P-8 surveillance aircraft flying over the South China Sea in 2015, when China was turning these piles of rocks in the South China Sea, the Spratly Islands, into what have become today what the Navy refers to as unsinkable aircraft carriers. They put landing strips on there, they put reinforced hangars. They now have surface to air missiles. They have warships. This is now a new Chinese territory where there aren’t invasions. This is a remarkable way of carrying out. You manufacture the territory and turn it into a new front

10:52 in this confrontation between the US and its rivals. There are lots of new fronts. These are two of Russia's new, more silent and therefore more threatening submarines that they’ve introduced. In fact, one of them is going to be visiting Cuba in the coming days and weeks. Nuclear-powered submarines. Nuclear-armed submarines. And they're quieter, which makes it harder for us to track them. If that sounds like the plot of a movie, well, it was. I often say that Hollywood doesn't just commemorate, but it sometimes sees the future. The Hunt for Red October is about silent submarines threatening the US. One note for movie nerds like myself. The political officer on the Red October, the bad guy on board. What was his surname? Anybody know?

11:38 His surname was Putin. They saw the future. Not just submarines. Cyberspace. When I visited the NSA operations center here, just outside of Washington, DC, they told me that the number of cyberattacks they handle each day from Russia and China. It’s not 1 or 2 or measured in the tens or the hundreds, but thousands of times a day. There is already a cyber front in this war, and it’s a hot front space. There are weapons in space, China and Russia are testing weapons that can ram into U.S. satellites. There are lasers in space-directed energy weapons that can blind our satellites. But not just the military depends on, it’s what you and I depend on. And not just to get around by GPS, communications, the internet, Starlink.

12:25 What’s interesting about the Masters of Space, which is one of the units of the new Space Force, is that it used to be called Masters of the Air, and they were among the units that flew air cover for the D-Day landings, as they’ve got a new mission today that’s flying air cover for all the things we depend on in space, including the space station. They also have an operations center. And in that operation center, they watch Chinese and Russian satellites circle US satellites like marauding forces. Another front in space. It’s happening today. Now, I said Hollywood sometimes sees the future. Anybody remember this movie? Got to be as old as me to remember this one, but Moonraker was about bad guys going up into space and stealing satellites out of space. China has a ‘kidnapper satellite’, as the US calls it,

13:13 with a grappling arm that can pluck critical satellites out of orbit in the event of conflict and blind us. Hollywood could see the future. Ukraine has taught us that we’re already in the age of drone warfare. This is a Ukrainian drone taking out a Russian drone. This is happening all over the battlefield every day there, and it’s central to that conflict. Multiple new fronts. There's one more front that's particularly worrying. It's not new, but it's getting bigger. And that's the nuclear front. These are new silos that China is building in Xinjiang in the western part of the country. China is a nuclear power, has been for a number of years, but it’s a rapidly growing new nuclear power, not just going up by 10% or 20%,

13:59 but doubling, tripling the number of warheads it has over time. Of course, Russia is the largest nuclear power in the world. North Korea is now nuclear. Iran is very close. And the trouble is, as those nuclear threats grow, we have fewer treaties to govern them. Two fewer treaties with Russia, no nuclear treaties with China, certainly no nuclear treaties with North Korea and nothing with Iran. When I met Bill Burns, the CIA director, for this book, the way he described it to me is that we were facing a perilous time here. And in his words, we’re playing without a net. We don’t have a net below us to catch us when the powers come into conflict to avoid us from falling to something more dangerous, We need to face up to that and find a way forward.

14:46 You might call it uncharted territory, terra incognita. But what’s good is that history can provide us maps to find the way forward, find the way forward, to stand up for what’s important to us, but also to avoid conflict. This man had a lot of wisdom that’s still relevant today. Winston Churchill. He said this of Hitler, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” There were appeasers in 1939 who said: “Let’s just give them a slice of this or a slice of that,” “it’ll all be fine.” Of course, it didn't work out that way. And the woman who has quoted Churchill to me many times regarding this is the leader of one of those eastern facing countries, Estonia, right on Russia's border, a NATO ally, but worried that if Ukraine loses, they will be its next target. And this is the man she quotes to her allies and others all the time to say:

15:34 “No, we can’t give him a slice.” “We can’t give the crocodile a meal and imagine he will stop eating.” “He’s still hungry.“ And by the way, the Estonians often remind me and their allies, they believe they are its next meal. So, the first rule, the first lesson, the first chart we can draw from history for terra incognita is reject those 1939 rules. They didn't work for us then. Appeasement didn't work then. It won't work today. I always argue when I’m talking about this that this is partly a values judgment for us. It’s standing up for democracy, for freedom, for our allies. Ask the Ukrainians what they want. They want their freedom. Ask the Taiwanese. They want to remain independent though they don’t use that words,

16:20 from China under the CCP. So, it’s a values argument, but it’s also an interest argument. Any conflict like this, it’s going to touch us at home. It’s the nature of cyber weapons. It’s the nature of space weapons. We can't hide from it. But it would also take away things we’ve grown used to and benefited from. We benefit from free trade. We benefit from free travel. We benefit from the rule of law. It’s a values argument, and it’s a self-interest one as well. One more lesson of history. Cuba, 1960 2nd October. Russia put nuclear missiles there, and this brought the two superpowers at the time, the US and Russia, the closest the world has come to nuclear conflict at the time. John F Kennedy made sure that everybody in his cabinet read “The Guns of August”,

17:05 which was the history of the descent into World War I, a descent that wasn’t preordained, but was full of miscommunications, entangling alliances, questions, egos, etc. And he said to his brother, “RFK, I don’t want anybody to write a book about me In the wake of this, called “The Missiles of October.” He wanted to stand up, but he did not want to lead his nation into war. And that’s why today, we need to reset that net, that Bill Byrnes talked about. Reset that net in a number of ways: negotiations, treaties, clear communication, standing up for what you believe in and what you believe not only represent your values and your interests, but also finding a way to communicate so that you avoid the worst outcomes.

17:51 A lot of those treaties we had that we relied on in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, they're no longer there. Now, those closest to the battle, they don’t believe this is an intellectual exercise. They believe it is existential. I went on a patrol with NATO forces in the Baltic Sea last year. That’s a NATO jet over a NATO ship. But it's a test. They are preparing for the idea of a Russian attack. Now, what was interesting, in the middle of that drill Russian jets came close towards our convoy. So, they went from a drill to an actual preparation alert for a potential Russian attack. That attack didn’t happen, but, boy, it was close. And they're taking it very seriously. Again, not an intellectual exercise for them,

18:39 but an existential one in their view. It’s scary, but there are inspiring moments and I want to give you two of them before we finish. When I was in Ukraine, in those early days and weeks of the war, I saw these everywhere, lines outside of recruiting stations, people standing up, volunteering to defend their country. In that line, there were teenagers and there were 75-year-old military veterans, all of them saying, “I want to do my part now.” And we’ve seen others in other countries stand up to do the same, including Americans who’ve gone there to fight. And a short time ago, I received this flag from that mood, in fact, as a gift. This is a flag from Ukrainian commanders on the front lines of Ukraine signing, thanking the U.S. for its support, but also saying they’re still going to fight. They're not done.

19:25 They're defending their own country. And they believe helping us defend the world. We want to live in freedom versus the lack of freedom. Now, as we know, in this country, flags can divide. They can be signs of false strength at times. They can be political, but flags can also show what you stand for and what you're willing to fight for. And I do believe that as we do that, we don’t want to treat the adversaries as ten feet tall. They have their own weaknesses. We have strengths and advantages. The greatest one being that our cause is stronger by its nature, freedom versus the lack of freedom. So. I bring you back to the question I asked at the beginning. What kind of world do you want to live in, do you want your children to live in? Your grandchildren? I'd say it's a free one.

20:13 Thank you. (Applause)