Frontline special - former diplomat Tim Willasey-Wilsey
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. I'm Alex Dibble and I executive produce the podcast. The World in 10 is partnered with Frontline, the interview series from Times Radio, available on YouTube, with expert analysis of the world's conflicts. At the weekend, we bring you Frontline interviews in full. Here's one from this week. I hope you find it interesting.

I'm James Hansen, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Tim Willisey-Wilsey, a visiting professor of war studies at King's College London and a former British diplomat. Tim, we always appreciate your time. Welcome back to Frontline. Pleasure. Good to see you, James. First of all, I wonder if you can sum up, if you can, what you make of the events of the past week or so.

A lot of people are saying this isn't just the US abandoning Ukraine. This is the US actively siding with Russia. But is it even more fundamental than that? Is this the end of the transatlantic alliance of the West as we know it? Well, I think, you know, it's been it's been a spectacular couple of weeks, let's face it, absolutely spectacular.

I mean, you could say some of this we should have seen coming, but I think there's still plenty that we should have been surprised about and amazed about. I think the first thing is, and I have to say, I think Keir Starmer has played his hand very well so far, but I think he's now facing a real sort of deviation in the road and he's got to take the right path.

So far, what we've been trying to do is sort of save the status quo. Check. Do we still have a US-UK close relationship? I never like using the term special relationship, but close relationship. Do we still have Article 5 NATO guarantee? Do we still have the Americans inside NATO? No.

All of these things are of massive importance for the UK, probably more than for most countries, because we've got this unique intelligence sharing relationship with the United States, which, of course, is actually being discussed today, of course, which is an important point. But also, we've got the nuclear deterrent, which, you know, if the Americans don't cooperate, you know, might not work in future. We've got the five eyes relationship, we've got an important trading relationship, you know, so it's very, very important. So,

For Keir Starmer to decide, as he I suppose might have done, that Trump has sort of left the reserve and that we're dealing with an entirely new world would have been irresponsible. He had to try and save what can be saved and to check that all those relationships are still workable.

Now, you know, a week after that, those events in the White House, where do we stand? I mean, do we think that what we're seeing in the Trump administration is just a rightward shift, maybe an extreme rightward shift in American politics? So are we talking about incrementalism, whereby we can just

You know, we can just manage the change in U.S. policy, as we had to do when, you know, when Carter was replaced by Reagan, for example. You know, we have to we have to adapt to the new reality. Or are we looking at something completely different? You know, is is the Trump administration just a right wing phenomenon or is it actually a sort of personal cult?

And is it a personal cult that we might have to live for with for 12 years? Because, you know, one senses that J.D. Vance is probably more or more extreme than Trump. So, you know, we might be looking at a completely new world.

But you have to forgive Starmer for doing everything possible to try and see what can be salvaged from the relationship. And that's what I think that whole effort in the White House by Starmer and his team was about, deploying the letter from the king and everything. And, you know, I think it was skillfully done. I think he also handled, by the way,

Zelensky's sort of early arrival in London extremely well, walking down Downing Street to greet him, hugging him. I think that was done extremely well. So I think, you know, full marks to Starmer so far. But we may be looking at a completely different world. And I think there are aspects now where, you know, we've got to be very careful to navigate between appeasement

and calling out some things that need to be called out. Now, for example, you could argue that we should have called out Trump's comments about Canada much earlier. After all, the king is king of Canada as well. And in many ways, it's rather surprising that we didn't. But quite rightly, I think we decided, hang on, let's wait till Starmer gets to the White House and see what he can do.

we could be accused of appeasing our ally America over our ally Denmark over the comments on Greenland.

um we could be accused of appeasing you know the the whole idea of Gaza becoming a Riviera and everything so you know we've bitten our tongue we've there are all sorts of things with that a Labour government left of centre government would doubtless like to have said to Trump which they did not want to say for for the sake of saving the overall UK US relationship but there may come a point

where we decide that actually we've got to speak out and we've now got to look to our own resources for our own foreign policy and defence policy. Just wanted to get your reaction, Tim, to some news that we've had breaking literally in the last couple of minutes. Yesterday, we heard that the US is pausing military aid to Ukraine. It's just been confirmed by the CIA Director John Ratcliffe that the US is also pausing intelligence sharing with Ukraine.

In practice, how big a difference will that make? How big a blow is that to Kiev? It's huge. I mean, intelligence sharing with Kiev has been extremely important. And actually, given that Kiev is fighting a defensive war,

you know, other than the slight incursion into Kursk, there's nothing aggressive about Ukraine's war. I mean, it is really pretty outrageous, actually, that we are not prepared to provide intelligence which can save Ukrainian lives, because that's what intelligence will be doing, saving Ukrainian lives. So no, I think, you know, as a means of

forcing Zelensky to the negotiating table when yesterday he said that he was willing to come to the negotiating table. It is outrageous. And I think it tells us something about this US new administration. And coming back to my sort of our previous discussion, I think it helps Starmer and the Labour Party and the British government generally and the British political scene generally to decide whether we're looking at

as I say, an incrementalist government which has just moved to the right or something completely new. And I think we're probably looking at something completely new, which we probably cannot live with. Do you think also when we're looking at potentially something completely new, it's not even so much that this is a realignment or a fundamentally new way of looking at the world. It's that so much of it is shaped around Donald Trump's personality, which is impulsive, which very often isn't strategic. People were speculating on Friday whether that was a deliberate ambush of Zelensky in the Oval Office.

I'm not even sure Trump

has enough foresight to plan an ambush in that way. I think he's often more instinctive, more impulsive. And just if he's agitated, if he's unimpressed with someone, he will allow that to show. And I wonder if that is a completely new state of affairs for America's traditional allies in Europe to deal with. Yeah, I have to say it looked like an ambush to me, James. But irrespective of that, you're absolutely right. Is Trumpism a thing or is it a sort of personal cult?

And if you read John Bolton's excellent book, The Room Where It Happened, which was, you know, I mean, remember the days we used to regard John Bolton as extreme right wing, you know, I mean, to the right of Cheney and Rumsfeld. We used to regard John Bolton as sort of rather unacceptable. And here he is now, the voice of reason. And that tells you something, doesn't it?

If you read John Bolton's book, it's very clear that Trump is mercurial. He's quixotic. He's driven by the latest mood. So overweening personal vanity, personal animosities. He's got an animosity towards Zelensky. That's absolutely clear.

And sort of bizarre fixations. You know, he had that in his first term, his sort of fixation about the amount of money they spent in Korea, for example, South Korea. So there were various things that would just set him off on what John Bolton calls riffs, which I think translates in English into rants.

And yeah, so it's very quixotic. So I think the people who, you know, there's an article by Roger Boyes in The Times today, which sort of suggests that this is all part of a master plan to redirect energy against China. I don't think it is at all. I think for all we know, he might come to an agreement with Xi Jinping. I think he rather admires Xi Jinping like he admires Kim Jong-un and like he admires Putin. He likes strong, strong men.

So the idea that there's a sort of master plan, I don't believe. I agree with you entirely. I think a lot of this is driven by personal, you know, personal issues. As a result, if there is no master plan, if there is no real strategy behind US policy towards Ukraine, could it all fall apart? Could we see the Trump administration's approach to this kind of descend into chaos, particularly if

fissures open up between different members of the administration, talk of Marco Rubio potentially being less impressed with what Trump and Vance have been doing in recent weeks. Do you think we may see that at some point, Tim? I don't think he needs to worry about regime unity, by which I mean US regime unity. I think one of the more disturbing aspects of what's happened over the last few weeks is that the so-called moderates, of which I would only identify Marco Rubio and perhaps Keith Kellogg,

are being sidelined. And the Hegseths, the Vances, you know, the Musks, are coming centre ground. So these are people who, if anything, are more extreme than their master, Trump. I think that's what's disturbing about Vance and Hegseth. And coming back to, you know, whether we should have been shocked by all of this.

I think it was the comments by Hegseth and Vance at the Munich Security Conference. Nothing they said should have surprised anyone in the audience. I think the element of surprise was the sheer contempt at Europe. This wasn't just contempt at Europe freeloading on American defence. I got the distinct feeling it was contempt at Europe. And I think that came out in Vance's comments on what was undoubtedly meant to be a reference to French and British troops, you know, a day ago.

So I think that is probably the most disturbing aspect of it. You know, you can deal with policy disagreements, but I think if there is actually fundamental underlying contempt, that's going to be a lot more difficult to address. You mentioned French and British troops. Of course, one of the things that's been mooted is this idea of a coalition of the willing on the ground in Ukraine, peacekeeping troops trying to preserve the peace.

In reality, that is likely to be led by Britain and France. Keir Starmer would like some kind of US backstop, but to me, that seems incredibly unlikely now.

How realistic do you think it is that if there were British and French troops on the ground as peacekeepers in Ukraine, that would be any kind of effective deterrence against future Russian aggression? I think this is the one starmer misstep, actually, this fixation on troops on the ground. I can see why he started it off. He wanted to demonstrate to the United States, we're prepared to do our bit as long as you do your bit. But once it became apparent that, as I think it has become very apparent, that the United States is not prepared to produce a backstop,

I think we should have abandoned it completely. And I think there are a number of reasons. Firstly, we don't have enough troops. You know, I mean, the UK does not have enough troops.

Number two, we are not trained or equipped for that sort of warfare. You know, we don't do this very modern drone warfare and so forth. It's very clear, incidentally, of our training of Ukrainian troops in the UK, which Ukraine is very grateful for. Some Ukrainian troops have been saying, actually, guys, you know, you're way out of date. We're now fighting a completely different war of drones and, you know, so forth. So we're not trained or equipped.

Then I think that comes the question, you know, there aren't enough. So it would have to be so many different nations. So there would have to be, you know, French, you know, I don't know, Italians, Finns, Estonians. There'd be so many nations there. We all have to agree on rules of engagement because are we really to believe that in three years time,

if Putin crosses the ceasefire line, and what he would do, of course, is cross it just five kilometers or something to test our resolve. Are we really going to shoot, said Russians, or are we going to do a sort of Srebrenica in which the Dutch troops just stood back and let stuff happen? Either way would be a massive problem and humiliation. So fortunately, this is not going to happen because I don't think Putin's going to agree to any NATO troops

on Ukrainian soil. And I suspect that Trump will concede to Putin on that point. So fortunately, I don't think it's going to happen because it's a crazy idea and a bad idea. And the best people to monitor the front line in Ukraine are going to be Ukrainian troops.

heavily, I hope, equipped with European weaponry, state-of-the-art European weaponry. And then the question is of the backstop. Well, I don't believe the Americans are going to provide a backstop. And I think this idea that Trump entered out that, well, if you've got American mining personnel

in Ukraine as part of the minerals deal, well, that serves as a backstop. I mean, that is complete nonsense. Say there were 15 or 25 mines, titanium, lithium, zirconium mines in Ukraine, and say there were 150 American miners, you know, supervising the extraction of minerals. Um,

Is that going to stop Putin? I mean, Putin would just be very careful not to hit those mines and very careful not to kill any or many Americans. But it's not a backstop. It's not going to provide any security guarantee at all. And I mean, if I may be permitted, one other slight criticism of the Starmer response, because I think he has done really well so far in very, very difficult circumstances.

I think, you know, it has been, I suspect Europe has been obliging Zelensky to go back to sign the minerals deal without the backstop. Now, the minerals deal anyway, I don't know what you think, but it smacks to me of blackmail anyway. But to ask him to give up Ukraine's sort of future, you know, prosperity deal,

in return for nothing, just because we think it might help bring Trump on board, I think is actually pretty irresponsible. So I think that's another unfortunate aspect of what's happened in the last couple of weeks.

Well, it's a fact I've mentioned a number of times on Frontline in recent days that the minerals deal would extract a greater percentage of Ukraine's GDP than the Allies extracted from Germany after the First World War. And of course, Germany was the aggressor there. It is a remarkable state of affairs. What we've also seen, and it's interesting you think this may be

under the influence of the Europeans. Zelensky trying to rebuild bridges to some extent with Trump post-Friday and those scenes in the Oval Office. He sent a letter to Trump, which Trump quoted in his long address to Congress last night, saying, and I quote, my team and I stand ready to work under President Trump's strong leadership to get a peace that lasts. We really do value how much America has done to help Ukraine maintain its sovereignty and independence. And he's also apparently offered to sign the minerals agreements at any

time that is convenient. If you are Zelensky, do you have any choice there? Do you have to try in some way to rebuild bridges with Trump? Yes, because he's under pressure, I think, from the Europeans. But look, look how effective it's been. I mean, after that, there's been a suspension of intelligence sharing with Ukrainians. So this is brutal. This is brutal stuff. And, you know, one has to read into it.

Trump's longstanding dislike of Zelensky, because I think he felt thwarted, you know, back in the early days over Hunter Biden and all of that sort of stuff. So this brings you back to your point about this personal animosity and all of this, which is very, very difficult to get over.

I want to ask you, Tim, about the new or the soon to be new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. He's announced a deal to raise hundreds of billions of extra euros for defence spending. He also spoke of a need for urgency on German spending in light of recent decisions by the American government. How key a figure do you think Friedrich Merz will be over the coming months?

Very key. And I thought those were great statements he made very early on, you know, and he didn't need to make them, but he made them. And I thought that was extremely good. So Mertz, I think, is a beacon of hope here. And there's a real chance of a Mertz-Macron-Starmer sort of coalition, the three most important countries together.

The fourth most important country I would really like to cement into that relationship is Georgia Maloney. My big worry about Georgia Maloney is she could defect to the Trump side of the argument. And if she did do that, I mean, I think we can live with

We can live with Hungary, Slovakia and possibly Austria hostile to European intentions. But I think if Italy went over to Trump, that would be an absolute disaster. I suspect that played, incidentally, quite an important role during the London conference. And I don't know if you noticed, but Maloney made statements about the importance of US and Europe staying together. And that sort of slightly skewed the London conference towards Europe.

You know, how can we keep America on side? Whereas I had hoped the intention of the London conference is what can we, Europe, do to keep Ukraine afloat? And of course, in spite of that, J.D. Vance then criticized the London conference for the London summit for, you know, being beholden again on American largesse. So whatever we did, it rather backfired.

But yeah, Merz, Macron, Starmer, Maloney would be a very, very powerful, credible foursome. But we mustn't lose Maloney. The other thing we need to bear in mind, and I, you know, I hate to mention this, but, you know, a couple of years down the road, we could be looking at Le Pen instead of Macron.

We could look at Maloney still there. We could look at Starmer obviously still in post, but being under siege from Farage and an emergent sort of reform party. And Mertz feeling increasingly nervous about further AFD gains. So, you know,

We need to build our European response on firm ground. And one feels that there are sort of shifting sands under us. One of the other things that was mooted over the weekend, reportedly a French proposal primarily, was this idea of a one month long truce between Russia and Ukraine. Is that viable in your view? I don't really understand what the point of it is.

I mean, Ukraine could certainly do with the breather. There's no question about that. Russia would benefit from the breather as well, of course. I suppose there is a notion that the ceasefire line then becomes the line for the larger peace deal, which is a way of getting round

Zelensky's objections to giving up territory. And I mean, I think, you know, in the real world, Zelensky is going to have to give up territory. I mean, certainly the Crimea and parts of the Donbass. You know, we can then debate about what can he trade for the Kursk salient? Can he get, for example, can he get Russia out of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant? That would be very important as well. So I'm not quite sure what Macron is trying to achieve there.

unless he feels there's some benefits of freezing the lines along current lines, rather than a line that Trump might agree to, which might be all four provinces of the Donbass, for example, which would be a disaster for Kiev. So maybe there's a worry in the Alize that Trump might concede more to Russia than the current lines of conflict.

I wonder, Tim, if there's more still that Europe could be doing right now to help Ukraine and specifically the thing a lot of people have mentioned. Rishi Sunak, former UK prime minister, has come back out and said this in recent days, that now is the time to seize the frozen Russian assets and use them to fund Ukraine's defence.

I absolutely understand and sympathize with that argument. My only fear would be what response you may get from Washington, who appear to be all in with Putin currently, and whether they may say, look, if you do that, we will lift US sanctions on Moscow. Yeah. And of course, the time to do this was, you know, when we had Biden in the White House, I mean, you know, and there was a real timorousness on the part of mainly the Europeans from doing it. And

for no actually particularly good reason. Chatham House did a very good paper on this, and they were worried about retaliation. But the world financial system is very much dependent on the dollar and the euro, and there isn't a Chinese or Indian currency yet to replace either. The time to have done it was a year ago or six months ago or two years ago. To do it now risks a US retaliation. You're absolutely right. But nonetheless, Europe should do it.

and should face down the Americans on this. And I mean, I think it is time. I was saying to you earlier that I think Starmer has avoided appeasement so far. There are some things I don't like.

I don't like forcing Zelensky to sign the minerals deal without a backstop. I didn't like excluding the Baltic states from the London summit. There are some things which I think smack of minor appeasement. But I think actually Trump actually admires power.

And I think a firm statement from Europeans, sorry guys, we're doing this. And yeah, there might be retaliation, but there's going to be retaliation. There are going to be downsides from this. There's going to be real world economic and financial pain from the...

It's too early to say breakdown, but from the travails in our relationship with Washington. What could the Europeans do that would most worry Vladimir Putin or make life most difficult for Vladimir Putin? Seizing the assets. I mean, the assets are, I mean, I think in European banks alone, it's over 200 billion. So, I mean, that is big. That is really big if you're Moscow. Yeah.

And we need that money if Europe is going to shore up Ukraine pending a deal. I mean, I think one thing probably I've not said enough in this interview is I do accept there's got, I've always accepted that there'll be peace in 2025. There's got to be a deal in 2025.

What we in Europe have got to make sure is that Trump doesn't replicate Afghanistan and sell the whole shop, which is what he did in Afghanistan. I mean, he gave everything away in return for nothing.

And, you know, Taliban in power, no counterterrorist cooperation, you know, all the blood and treasure was just gifted away to the Taliban by Trump, not by Biden. I mean, Biden really, really mishandled the evacuation. That's true. But the shot was held by Trump. Let's be clear about that. What we need to do is to avoid another completely feckless negotiation.

And the way that Trump has already

talked about Russia, about, you know, admitting it to the G8, reducing sanctions, about, you know, giving them, they can keep the Crimea. All of this sort of stuff suggests already he's prepared to do a similar sort of deal to the one in Afghanistan. So there's got to be peace in 2025. Europe's job is to get the best deal possible. And the best way of doing that is to get us a seat at the table

get Ukraine a seat at the table and drive a really hard bargain. And one way to do that is to seize the assets. Another way is to pull together a plan urgently whereby we try and replicate as much as possible what the United States has been providing. Now, we know we can't do everything. We can't do 155 millimeter ammunition, enough of it.

But, you know, the war has changed a bit. A lot of it is actually Ukrainian driven drones. And a lot of it they need is money just to buy more. They use vast numbers of these drones. And, you know, so that's what I think Europe should be doing, driving to the best possible peace deal. And, you know, in the brutal world of international politics,

Zelensky is not going to get everything he wants. He's not going to get war crimes trials. He's not going to get the Crimea back. He's not going to get reparations other than the 200 billion that we should seize. Just finally, Tim, is that your biggest concern, that if we do see peace in 2025 and it's a Trump deal, it will be a chaotic peace? Because Trump, for all that he likes to pose as a great dealmaker...

he's a vain man who likes to waft around his piece of paper saying, look, I've agreed a peace deal. But as you rightly say, with his deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, it leads to chaos in the long term. And is that what we need to be most vigilant about, that we don't allow Trump to deliver a chaotic peace for Ukraine? Yeah. And the chaotic peace in Ukraine is the one that allows

Putin to kick off again in 18 months, three years, five years, five years time, not just necessarily against Ukraine, but maybe against Estonia or, you know, test whether Article 5 still exists, whether NATO resolves still exists. So exactly that. Yeah, that's what we've got to be careful about. Remembering that the great negotiator,

It's a very different world negotiating property deals in the United States, where a lot of it is based on muscle, not the sort of foreign policy finesse with which international agreements are usually negotiated. Tim, we always appreciate your insight and your expertise. Thank you so much for joining us again on Frontline. Pleasure, James. Thank you.

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