- Ukraine is heroically defending us before this evil man at a cost to us of less than 1% of our GDP.

We can afford this.

[soft music] [soft music] - Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and I'm coming to you from Washington DC, where some of America's closest allies convened for the annual NATO summit.

This year marks the 75th anniversary, who says that's old these days?

Of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's founding.

It's the most successful and enduring security alliance in the modern era.

And it comes at a time of deep political uncertainty both here in the United States and abroad.

Biden's reelection hopes in free fall.

European allies are confronting the prospect of another Trump presidency.

Here to talk about all that and more, Radek Sikorski.

He's foreign minister of Poland, one of those 32 member nations.

Poland has become, in many ways, the beating heart of Europe's and NATOs stand against Russia, taking in hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees and sending critical weaponry and support to Ukraine's front lines.

And after eight years of far-right rule in Poland, Sikorski's own centrist pro-European party took the reins of power last fall.

We'll get into all that and much more.

Don't worry, I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

- [Announcer] It's 3:00 AM, and your children are safely in bed, scrolling TikTok.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer 2] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Announcer 3] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint, and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - [Announcer 2] And by... - [Announcer 4] Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

- [Announcer 2] Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [soft music] [animation whooshing] [intense music] - "I don't realize it, but I seem to have gone to pieces."

That's a quote from the president of the United States, exhausted from a whirlwind travel schedule, admitting to a close advisor that he's just not all there.

But it's not a recent quote, and it's not from President Biden.

Not yet, at least.

In September of 1919, president Woodrow Wilson cut short a whistle stop train tour of the American West claiming a, quote, "Nervous reaction in his digestive organs."

The real cause, a pre-stroke breakdown that would days later severely paralyze the left side of his body, and leave him nearly blind in one eye.

For the remainder of his last year in office, Wilson was rarely seen in public, his wife becoming the shadow president.

History doesn't quite repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

There's no evidence that President Biden is suffering from a similar illness, but his disastrous debate performance last month has much of the country and the world questioning his fitness for a second term at the age of 81.

And as the chorus of Democrats calling for him to step aside grows, Biden's days to turn his campaign around are numbered.

And while plenty has been said about the national implications of #Bidenpanic, I wanna focus today on the global stakes.

And believe me when I tell you, I have never seen America's European allies this scared.

US voters may be divided on Trump versus Biden, but most of its European allies are not.

They overwhelmingly prefer the old school post-World War II, world order institutionalist that is President Biden.

Trump's unilateralist America first worldview is inherently skeptical of treaties and alliances that undergird the so-called liberal world order.

He once called NATO obsolete, and more recently suggested that he would allow Russia to invade countries that don't meet spending obligations.

- One of the presidents of a big country stood up, said, "Well sir, if we don't pay, and we're attacked by Russia, will you protect us?"

No, I would not protect you.

In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.

You got to pay.

You got to pay your bills.

[crowd cheering] - There's no getting around it.

The US election and Biden's recent stumbles are on the minds of every world leader I've talked with here at the NATO summit.

So too, Ukraine, whose fate may very well hinge on the US presidential election.

Former President Trump has vowed to end the Ukraine war on day one of his presidency.

I interpret that promise as essentially letting Putin win.

One man who is dead set on depriving Putin of that victory, Radek Sikorsky, Poland's new foreign minister.

Few European diplomats have been more outspoken about the threat that Russia poses to the European continent.

And during this moment of deep political uncertainty here in the United States, Sikorsky and his European allies face the real prospect of supporting Ukraine without the United States at the table.

Hence the agita in DC all through NATO week.

Here's our conversation.

[animation whooshing] Foreign Minister Radek Sikorsky, great to have you on the show.

- My pleasure, good morning.

- Here you are for the 75th anniversary of NATO.

Usually, that's considered to be a pretty big celebration this time around, one that has a lot of concerns.

What's your mood coming into the summit?

- Well, NATO is back to basics, to its original mission of repelling and resisting an aggressive Russia.

It was originally the Soviet Union, now it's Putin trying to rebuild his empire, but he misjudged us.

We are united, we are helping Ukraine, and we are going to prevail again.

He thought Ukraine would just cave in, and he would just walk into a victory parade, because he believed in his own propaganda that Ukrainians were just a bunch of provincial Russians who were dreaming of being liberated.

And how wrong that was.

And he also thought that some of EU countries would block joint decision making, that basically some EU politicians were in his grasp.

That was wrong, too.

And he probably thought we would huff and puff maybe a few token sanctions.

I don't think in his worst dreams he anticipated that we would be spending hundreds of billions of euros and dollars on arms and ammunition.

And that two years on, he would still be controlling only 20% of Ukrainian territory.

- This war has been going on for two and a half years now.

There is no end in sight.

It feels like a stalemate on the front lines right now, but of course, it doesn't feel like a stalemate at all in terms of the broader attacks that are happening against the Ukrainian civilian population as well as Ukrainian attacks inside Russia.

Talk a little bit about where this war is right now.

- I think Putin burnished his credentials as a war criminal when attacking that oncological hospital for children.

- [Ian] That was just at the beginning of the NATO summit.

- [Radek] And I think that was a message for us.

- [Ian] That was a message, it was clear.

- [Radek] Just like the killing of Navalny was a message to the Munich Security Conference.

- [Ian] Yeah.

- He does it deliberately thinking that he will intimidate us.

What's actually happening is that he's stiffening our resolve.

It's a mixed picture, I agree.

Russia is making incremental gains on the ground, but these come at a huge cost in treasure and blood.

It's estimated that at least half a million Russian soldiers have now been eliminated from the battlefield.

- Not dead, but casualties, all total numbers, yeah.

- [Radek] Dead, and- - And wounded.

- And wounded.

Plus, he definitely lost the battle of the Black Sea where Ukraine without a navy [laughing] defeated him at sea, and can now export its grain again.

And remember, the key component is that the Russian economy is beginning to collapse.

He's running out of Soviet era tank hulks that he could bring back to life, and he is spending his national reserve fund.

If he continues, in a year or two, Russia will run out of resources.

- So is the appropriate Western response, from your perspective, you hold the line and eventually the Russians will have to cave?

Is that really the case?

- Ukraine is heroically defending us before this evil man at a cost to us of less than 1% of our GDP.

We can afford this.

And it's the cheapest and most effective way to signal to Putin, but also to others that regaining what you regard as a renegade province is harder than you think.

- Now, of course, the Ukrainians are paying a lot more, and not just in terms of GDP, but I mean, it's a much smaller population, 44 million at the beginning of this war, a lot lower now.

About almost a million of them are in your country right now, and you've been hosting them, not personally, but broadly speaking.

- We had 10 people at our house.

- [Ian] Did you really?

- Yeah.

- I'm not shocked.

I mean it's, again, I know so many polls that it's part of the community.

It's not like they're in refugee camps.

So how long can the Ukrainians continue this fight?

How long can they continue to mobilize the reserves?

I mean, clearly, it's getting a lot harder for them now than it was a year ago.

- It is hard.

In my judgment, they should have started mobilization a year earlier.

It was delayed, just like the US package was delayed.

But Putin is motivating them to fight because of what he's doing in occupied territories.

Ratifying everything, deporting people- - [Ian] Forcing passports, for example, yeah.

- Stealing children, mass killings, the sort of exploitation taking over of companies and so on.

It is unbearable to live under Russian occupation.

So what else would you do except defend your country?

- Well, of course, there are a lot of reports of young Ukrainian men that are fleeing.

There are a lot of reports of, you know, they're hiding, and the parents don't want them to get mobilized.

And the reason the Ukrainians waited to bring the age from 28 to 26, it's not 21, is because it's so incredibly unpopular.

And the polls in Ukraine, not the Polish people, but the polls of opinion are saying that the desire to continue to fight has, it's still high, but it's a lot lower than it was a year ago, two years ago.

Despite everything you just said about the atrocities that are being committed every day by the Russians in Ukraine.

- Draft is never popular.

You had draft dodgers during the Vietnam War in this country.

We are trying to help the Ukrainians by offering to train a brigade of two initially in Poland, from Ukrainian volunteers that are in Poland.

Because apparently, what Ukrainian young men don't want, is they want, they do want to defend their country, but they don't want to go into the fight untrained and unarmed.

And the promise is that if we train them up to NATO standard, equip them up up to NATO standard, they will then be deployed as a unit to relieve their comrades at the front line, and then they can come back.

If all other NATO countries did that, we would have several brigades.

- You talked about how NATO is stronger today than it has been.

Certainly, there's a lot more money being spent, there's a lot more defense being mobilized.

I also just saw a NATO member, you know who I'm gonna say, Viktor Orbán, just made a trip to Moscow, made a trip to meet with Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, was not pre-cleared with other NATO allies.

And what he has been saying feels very different than what you're saying right now about what needs to happen on the ground in Ukraine.

How do you deal with a renegade ally like the Hungarians?

- As you said, he had absolutely no authority to do it on the behalf of either NATO or the EU.

So Orbán is freelancing on behalf of Hungary, and that's not a new thing.

He has been denying Ukraine transit of defense goods, and he has also been vetoing the release of European money for Ukraine.

Our prime minister hosting President Zelensky and more so yesterday.

We signed our G7 security compact, said that there were politicians in the past who thought, maybe even to themselves that they were bringing back peace, but history remembers them as appeasers.

And that's not necessarily a good thing to be.

- You see, I mean, Orbán is here in Washington, of course, as part of the NATO summit.

Do you feel like his presence, like his membership is significantly undermining, or in any way undermining the ability of NATO to act today?

- Hungary is the only country in NATO and the European Union which is unhappy with its borders.

Viktor Orbán, who by the way, went to my college, Pembroke, on a Soro scholarship, said a few years ago that Hungary is the only country in Europe that borders on itself.

That's what makes it different.

- And you're talking about... - It's to do with Hungarian history.

But the point is that what Putin has broken is the taboo under two bloody world wars, that you do not change borders by force.

That if you have a problem with your compatriots on the other side of an international line, you apply the Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of Minorities.

You do not send tanks.

- Now, there is an increasing view, and I will say I share it, that ultimately, the likelihood that Ukraine will be able to get all of their land back is low.

In other words, that some sort of a deal is gonna have to be made, and the Ukrainians have to be part of that deal, they have to accept it simply because the force that would have to be applied to get all of that land back, it does not appear to be available.

How do you respond?

Because that's clearly not NATO's position.

- Well ,then you agree with Viktor Orbán.

- [Ian] I don't, I do not.

I don't think it's legitimate.

I think it's- - There is never a shortage of pocket chamberlains.

- No, I- - Willing to- - I understand what you're saying.

- To give up other people's land or freedom.

- I'm not in a position- - For their own peace of mind.

- I'm not in a position to do that or say that, Radek.

What I'm saying is I think analytically that there is likely to be some form of partition in reality that is not acceptable from my perspective.

- But those are judgements that should be left- - [Both] To the Ukrainians.

- Just like the Fins in their Winter War with the Soviet Union negotiated directly with Stalin.

- At what point do you think it is either appropriate or essential?

Do you have any sense of when those forms of negotiations should start?

- I'm of a different view.

I think we can win this one.

- [Ian] You think they can take it all back.

- We can win this one.

Sure, the Russians have advantage in tanks, but the Ukrainians have advantage in drones.

They've been fighting a brilliant drone war using artificial intelligence, and picking targets, and prioritizing targets, and so on.

We will be learning from them.

I think Putin is at his wits end.

A country that is sending these "Mad Max" style vehicles into the fight and allows thousands of its soldiers to be killed every day in these fights for small villages, that's not a recipe for victory.

- The one conversation that I'm hearing with every leader I'm talking to here in NATO is how the American president is or isn't doing.

You are, of course, very aware of the debates of Biden's ability to continue to lead, to continue to stand as president.

Anything you can say to me about, I mean, to the extent that you and your government have had contact with him directly, do you see him as being able to fully fulfill the roles of American executive right now?

- [Radek] We had a summit here in Washington, our president and prime minister, and I was present, with President Biden.

He was focused, strategic, and actually quite amusing, too.

- So Sikorsky says Biden does not need to step down.

- Sikorsky says once you start interfering in the internal party political affairs of other countries, you are on a very slippery slope.

- Former President Trump has said that he would end the war immediately if he were to become president.

It's a very different perspective, his relationship with Zelensky, his personal orientation towards Putin, than what your government represents, or what the President American government represents.

What does a Trump presidency potentially mean for how the Ukrainian war needs to be fought for, what you're expecting to see from NATO?

- Well, first of all, Poland of course, wants to have the best possible relations with the US whoever is your president, goes without saying.

And actually, our president keeps in touch with candidate Trump.

I keep in touch with both sides of the aisle.

And what they tell me is that there are two schools in the candidate Trump camp, and one of them says that the way to bring a fair piece would be to threaten Putin with escalation.

And, you know, Putin is not a guy who will settle the war out of sympathy for Donald Trump.

He responds only to the toughest, hardest, cutting-edge power.

- And when you say that, what you mean is that either Putin is prepared to accept the peace plan that Trump is nominally prepared to float, or there are gonna be much tougher sanctions from the US against Russia than we see now?

- More deliveries to Ukraine.

- [Ian] There'd be more aggressive weapons that would be provided to the Ukrainians.

- Well, Putin, Russia is a signature of the Budapest Memorandum.

She guaranteed Ukraine's independence and borders- - [Ian] For giving up their nuclear weapons.

- For Ukraine giving up the third largest nuclear weapons arsenal in the world.

Putin personally signed the border treaty with Ukraine of 2004.

If he doesn't respect that treaty, how can you trust him respecting any other treaty?

The stablest way to settle this war is for Russia to move back beyond the international border.

- But what I hear you saying is you think it is wholly plausible that if Trump were to become president, which is, you know, certainly something that you have to plan for, that actually, US policy on Russia, Ukraine, could be very favorable and workable for the Ukrainians.

- Who am I to know this?

These are internal deliberations inside your one camp, or your politics.

But we've observed President Trump for years.

He was right on some issues.

He was right that NATO countries should spend- - Should spend more.

- 2%.

And Poland has been spending more 2% for the last 15 years.

- You're spending like 4% now, right?

- And we'll be spending five next year.

- Yeah.

- Highest in NATO, including the United States.

And we understand that President Trump appreciates that.

But if when he criticizes Joe Biden for so-called losing Afghanistan, then losing Ukraine would not be a victory, would it?

- There's a lot of negotiation now talks now about potentially Poland and others helping the Ukrainians to defend directly against Russian missiles.

So in other words, you know, aircraft flying in Polish airspace, but if the Russian missiles are coming in, NATO planes would try to shoot them down.

That's an active discussion.

- Well, Russian missiles breach Polish airspace.

- They have a couple of times, yeah.

- They turn through Poland and hit targets in Ukraine.

Their missiles also lose their bearings and drop on Poland.

One of them flew across two thirds of Poland and landed 10K from my house in Western Poland.

So we need to patrol our skies, and that's clearly a threat.

And actually, two of our people have already died from these explosions.

- By Ukrainian defense in response to- - So we are clearly in our right to shoot down Russian missiles that have entered our airspace.

But that's too late, because then they can already hit someone.

So the discussion is whether we could shoot down Russian missiles when they're clearly approaching Polish NATO airspace.

Personally, I think it'll be justified and legal.

- And also NATO has taken decisions recently allowing the Ukrainians to engage in some strikes into Russian territory against military targets.

It's taken a long time to get there.

This was also something that NATO wouldn't have even considered, thought it was way beyond the pale six months ago, 12 months ago.

Broadly speaking, it kind of feels like, you know, this is not strategic decision making around what is and is not appropriate escalation, but is instead, "Well, let's try this additional new little thing."

And then you just keep doing that, right?

Bit by bit.

- But it's also because at each of these stages, Putin does something so outrageous like hitting a children's hospital, like bombarding Kharkiv, like using these huge bombs that he forces us to show Ukrainian in other piece of sympathy.

- So, I mean, Trump says that we're getting closer to World War III.

Do you think we're getting closer to World War III?

- Hybrid warfare is already on, and it's the Russians who are the aggressors.

You know, we have these sabotage actions, these incendiary devices being left by GOU recruited people, including in the United States.

We have cyber attacks, we have espionage, we have a huge assault by deliberately imported migrants being forced again against the Polish border, which is the border of NATO and the European Union.

They are trying a multi-domain confrontation with us.

We also need to respond in all these domains.

And let's not forget who started it.

- No, absolutely.

- Putin has been at war with us for at least 10 years, and we were in denial.

- Since the 2014 invention.

- When he started bombing, it's clear he sent tanks, he started it, we just want to go back to normal, peaceful coexistence, and where he can finish this war in five minutes, by the way, making one phone call to his defense minister.

Ukrainians can't do that.

- Ukrainians can't do that.

Radek Sikorsky, thanks so much for joining today.

- A pleasure.

[soft music] And now the "Puppet Regime," where an old campaign ad suddenly has an entirely new meaning.

- [Announcer] It's 3:00 AM, and your children are safely in bed, scrolling TikTok, but there's a phone in the White House, and it's ringing.

[phone ringing] - Hang on.

- [Announcer] Because something's happening in the world.

[phone ringing] Who will answer that call?

Will it be... [beeping] ♪ After eight it's much too late ♪ ♪ For this head of state to be taking your call ♪ ♪ If sleepy Joe is snoring call him in the morning ♪ [phone beeping] - Okay, look, you know what?

Let's call other guy, he always takes my calls, always.

♪ Puppet Regime ♪ - That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, but you'd like to start your own security alliance, we will help you.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[bright music] [bright music continues] [bright music continues] [bright music continues] [soft music] - [Announcer 2] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Announcer 3] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint, [bright music] and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer 2] And by... - [Announcer 4] Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communication, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

- [Announcer 2] Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [bright music] [uplifting music]