General Colin Powell Underscores Need to Understand and Respect the Other Side

“I know Vladimir Putin well,” General Colin Powell said during a recent appearance at Harvard University. “He’s KGB through and through.” Powell, a former Secretary of State, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and national security advisor, was on campus on October 30 to participate in Harvard’s American Secretaries of State Project.

During a luncheon and a question and answer session, Powell discussed many of the geopolitical hotspots of the day. He characterized Russia as “basically a weak country” but said that Putin was playing his hand very well. “I wouldn’t quite call him a tsar,” Powell said of Putin, “but he sure models one from time to time.”

The retired four-star general urged the United States to “push back” against Russia’s misadventures in Ukraine and Syria, but also insisted that Americans need to better understand the Russian mindset. Based on decades of firsthand experience, Powell said Russian leaders are inherently paranoid. “You are surrounding us! Why are you surrounding us?” was a constant refrain he heard from Russian leaders.

With that in mind, Powell said the U.S. should be cautious about expanding its military presence along Russia’s borders. He also expressed opposition to providing lethal arms to the Ukraine government, saying that Russia would always overmatch whatever aid NATO provided.

Powell also discussed the chaos currently engulfing the Middle East. He said that he doesn’t believe airstrikes alone can destroy ISIS, which he characterized as a long-term problem that will continue to spread throughout the region. The only way to defeat ISIS, according to Powell, is with “forces on the ground, and those forces have to be supported by a political system that the people believe in...”

With regard to Syria, Powell argued there is a “level of strategic incoherence” to U.S. policy, as Washington doesn’t know who to support in the country. He also warned the U.S. to be cautious about calling for Bashar al-Assad to go. “[W]e have to be a little careful when we take the top off a government,” Powell said, “no matter how lousy and evil that top is...”

Besides addressing contemporary issues, Powell also reflected on his time as Secretary of State. He argued that while some members of the George W. Bush administration wanted a conflict with Iraq from after 9/11, the president wouldn’t have taken the country to war if it weren't for concerns about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

“[I]f the weapons of mass destruction case wasn’t there, it [the Iraq War] would not have happened,” Powell told an overflow audience at Harvard Law School. In discussing Saddam Hussein’s refusal to come clean about WMDs before the war, Powell said Saddam “kept hoping that the French and the Russians would bail him out in due course, and that we couldn’t hold this coalition together. And he was wrong.” In the end, Powell said he supported the president’s decision to go to war, but regrets the way it was executed.

He also offered students and faculty some lessons he had taken away from years of public service, including to “always show respect” to the other side.