03/13/14 – Scott McConnell – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
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Well, I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
ScottHorton.org is my website.
And my next guest is Scott McConnell.
He's a founding co-founder, editor, co-founding editor of the American Conservative magazine.
Available for subscription and on your newsstand and online at theamericanconservative.com.
Welcome back to the show, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
So your last three pieces here are really good stuff on Ukraine.
So I'll be very happy to hear what you think about it out loud, I'm pretty sure.
Starting with the fact that the American people, starting with the last thing you've written about here, the fact that the American people are pretty good on the Ukraine issue from a peace and liberty point of view, huh?
I have to admit that's a very pleasant surprise to me, because for the last three weeks there's been a media and politician, Washington politician drumbeat about Obama being weak and feckless and Russia's, you know, attempt to move against the new Ukraine government.
As being this huge, huge, you know, threat to world peace.
And it really didn't seem to me at all.
But I thought when you have, like, generally people follow the lead of what the Washington elites are saying.
And in this case, not at all.
I.e. there was a recent Pew Research poll that said, should the United States, you know, not care very much about Ukraine?
Or should we, you know, consider a range of responses from severe sanctions to military options?
And the, you know, basically the answer of, this isn't really a big deal for us was, you know, by kind of two to one margins, you know, 55 to 25 percent.
Or among independents it was, I think, 62 percent to 25.
I mean, really fairly decisive margins.
So it was a kind of surprising disjuncture between what the people were saying in response to the straightforward poll question and what the range of Washington politicians from, you know, Hillary Clinton to John McCain was saying.
So I thought that was an encouraging sign.
But still, the Ukraine situation is dangerous because we might do more than we need to.
Yeah, I think the way you write it here, you seem to be saying that the American people might have had the same attitude toward the Soviet Union even, except for the argument that the politicians made back in the Cold War was that, hey, hey, hey, we're not just talking about a big Russian empire here.
We're talking about ideological communism helping on conquering the planet Earth.
We must resist.
You know, those circumstances, they were willing to have a Cold War.
Fine, let's contain them then, the Americans said.
But without that, meh.
What do we care about what's going on in some country we can't pronounce, you know?
It's true.
I mean, I personally think that the Cold War was a big deal.
I mean, I supported containment.
You didn't have to fight.
Like, fighting in Vietnam was not good.
But I generally, looking back, are supportive of the measures we did in Europe from 1947 onwards.
And I think that there were, you know, large issues at stake.
But I think everybody kind of intuitively understands spheres of influence.
And that Ukraine is historically very close to Russia.
It's not, you know, France and Italy.
It's not Germany.
It's not Hungary.
It's right there.
There are very important, you know, religious links between Ukraine and Russia.
And it's right there on the doorstep.
So what do the Russians think when we, you know, we have, you know, one of the top neoconservatives in the State Department is essentially, in Kiev a month ago, basically picking who the ministers would be of a new government in Ukraine.
I mean, I can't imagine that they would look at that as, like, benignly.
And they haven't.
Right.
In fact, here's that clip real quick, or a piece of it.
Economic experience, the governing experience.
I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience.
He's the guy, you know, what he needs is cleach and tiny book on the outside.
He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know.
Anyway, so that's the tone of the thing is Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, which is, I gather that's basically the ambassador to the European Union, Skaza, am I right?
She's the guy talking to the ambassador to Ukraine, and she's the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, which is probably the top official dealing with Europe in the Obama State Department.
And from what I saw, you know, Kerry and Obama were pretty much engaged with other things.
So she would have a lot of leeway in forging European policy.
And they're just talking about Ukraine like they own it.
Well, we're going to do this.
You know, I don't like this one guy.
I would rather have the other guy, the guy who, by the way, was just meeting with Obama in the Oval Office yesterday, the new Prime Minister Yats.
Yeah, yeah.
Perfect.
It's the first time I've heard the tape, actually.
It's good that you have it.
Oh, really?
Oh, I'll send you all the clips.
I'm going to waste your interview playing them, but I'll send them to you.
Victoria Nuland is the wife of Robert Kagan, who is one of the most important neoconservative foreign policy writers.
He co-writes a lot of things with Bill Kristol, and he's one of the sort of ideological engineers of the Iraq War, among other things, but of a generally very assertive, aggressive American foreign policy to begin with.
And I don't, I mean, I assume that Victoria and Victoria Nuland and Kagan see these things eye to eye.
And they, you know, they basically think the Europeans are a bunch of wimps because they care about, you know, economics and vacation more than they care about power politics.
And so here she is, I mean, right really on Russia's doorstep, you know, trying to organize a revolutionary anti-Russian government.
And it's extraordinary to me that Obama could let that happen, or that Kerry could let that happen, because I tend to think that Obama and Kerry are a little wiser than that, but they did, you know, and here we are.
Well, and you call this in one of your articles here, this entirely self-inflicted Ukraine disaster.
I talked with one writer who thought that maybe their offer to Yanukovych was deliberately so bad that he would have to turn it down and tilt back toward Russia all the easier to foment a coup.
They would rather have a deal with the next guy than a deal with the guy they didn't like.
That kind of possibility.
And yet all they really succeeded in doing was, I mean, even for the time being, they control the government in Kiev, or their friends do, but it looks like they're going to lose Crimea, which is what they're after in the first place, right?
I honestly don't know what's going to happen.
I think it's tricky for Russia to take Crimea because it isn't really linked by land.
So if you want to, like, trade with Crimea or you want to supply it with gas and stuff, you have to go through the eastern Ukraine.
And I mean, I'm actually worried about what might happen.
I mean, we've made it into, rather than sort of our policy should be, Ukraine should be a kind of neutral place between the West and Russia, and we understand that Russia cares, like, a lot about what goes on there.
Our policy had been, let's take Ukraine away from Russia, move it to the West, and make it part of our alliance structure.
And I don't know, it's not easy to divide the country up.
I mean, I don't really have answers, but it's not going to be like Russia's going to be able to just take Crimea, I don't think.
I think that's geographically a little difficult, because Crimea is not connected to Russia, except through, like, these straits and stuff.
Well, although in the east, it's just, isn't there a bridge there?
Or it's just a very small hub.
They could build a bridge pretty easily.
They could build a bridge, but, you know, a bridge is not, I mean, it's, yeah, I mean, they can build a bridge, but...
I mean, it's closer than the Florida Keys are to Florida, and they got a bridge there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like the Saudis rolling tanks into Bahrain, right?
Yeah.
No, I mean, Russia can, you know, can certainly militarily control Crimea, but the eastern Ukraine, which is, I think, somewhat more Russian-oriented, certainly more Russian-oriented than the western Ukraine, is in play.
There's now, like, you know, headlines in the Times, at least, this afternoon about a lot of Russian troop activity on the borders of eastern Ukraine.
I don't know true, not true, how true, what it means, but, you know, I don't think that this, I mean, we, it seems to be gearing up into, like, a major crisis.
And it would probably be not a good thing to have a major crisis about.
It's certainly an area infinitely more important to Russia than to us, and I think we have a real national interest in having, like, calm relations with Russia.
I mean, there's, you know, that's...
Well, yeah, I mean, to have a border dispute this far from our borders seems a little strange to me.
But, yeah, I want to talk with you about some of the interests that we have with the Russians, and just how important, in the scheme of things, those interests might be, compared to who rules in Kiev.
More with Scott McConnell from the American Conservative Magazine when we get back from this break.
Just a minute, y'all.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Scott McConnell.
He's got a great first name and a great little magazine over there, The American Conservative Magazine, home of the anti-war right, TheAmericanConservative.com.
And we're talking about this disaster, this building disaster in Ukraine.
As Scott was saying right before the break, reports are that the Russians are mobilizing troops near the eastern border of Ukraine.
And I guess that would be the next move on the chessboard if Putin wants to make it, would be seizing east Ukraine.
And I guess Obama would have to just, would just have to take it.
But what if they took the whole country?
Wouldn't he have to do something about that, quote unquote, according to power politics in Washington, D.C.?
Well, there's not, I don't think, I don't think you would have an intentional war about that.
And I, but I actually don't think that would happen.
But even, you know, troops in the eastern Ukraine is likely to get everybody very tense for a long time.
Well, I don't want to be overly alarmist.
I'm just like reading the headlines in the New York Times on the web.
I don't have a...
Yeah, I don't like being alarmist either.
I mean, it seems to me like Putin's already winning in every way.
Last time we did a coup there in 04, all he had to do was wait around a couple of years and then he got this guy in.
And now we've cooed him again, Yudakovich.
But, you know, he'll have another, especially like if you're saying maybe he doesn't run off with Crimea, then he'll have another chance at the ballot box in a little while, assuming they keep holding elections over there.
Yeah.
I mean, so why blow it?
Why go so far as to even have any level of war proxy or otherwise over there?
I think it's hard for the Ukrainians.
I mean, it's a very divided country, and I think it's hard for them to have elections where they, you know, even remotely agree on much common ground between the East and West.
I mean, I've known just Western Ukrainians who are completely disdainful of the Russian-Ukrainians.
Anyway.
Yeah, it's almost like the Sunnis in Iraq call the Shiites the Iranians, even though they're not.
They're Iraqis, but they're the Iranians.
I guess Putin, he's quoted as once telling George W. Bush, you know, it's not a real country.
And I don't, and Bush, I mean, who knows?
I don't know what a real country is.
But I think that the Russians don't think of Ukraine as a real country, probably.
Yeah.
Well, so I don't know, talk a little bit more about, and you've written about this at the American Conservative too, Scott, about, well, what interest do we have at stake?
What makes it so important that we get along with the Russians, other than the fact that they have H-bombs?
In other words, you know, when it comes to picking on somebody our own size, they are.
And so we better be careful about that in the worst case scenario sense.
But what about everything else we got to work with them on?
Well, first, Afghanistan.
We have troops in Afghanistan.
We're going to have them there.
They're going to come out, I think, fairly soon.
But they are, at least I think a lot of their resupplying, and I actually don't know the percentage, comes through a Russian base in, oh, what, how do you say it?
Ulanovsk, or somewhere like that.
I can't, somebody can correct my Russian, but it's Lenin's birthplace, actually.
But that's, you know, the main non-Pakistani supply conduit.
So to get stuff in and out to the remaining American troops there.
So, you know, if we decide to get really, really tough with Russia over, you know, Crimea, then, you know, maybe that base won't be supplying them.
You know, I guess the American troops could get out through Pakistan.
But that might be, you know, I can imagine that that would be costly in a lot, and certainly more expensive, but perhaps bloodier.
And I'm sure that the American commanders of the American troops in Afghanistan do not want to see their access to resupply through the Russian route cut off, which, right.
Secondly, you know, there's these, there's dreadful things going on in Syria.
It's not, I don't know, you know, it's difficult to say whose fault it is, but there's, I think there's a common human interest in seeing the extent that great powers can cooperate to make, to stop a civil war.
It requires Russia and America being kind of on the same page rather than thinking, you know, it's a, you know, whatever, you know, as good for me as bad for you and vice versa, which I mean, so, but if you make a Cold War situation out of it, it's going to be, you know, a humanitarian disaster for Syria.
Thirdly, Iran, it's kind of interesting.
I think Russia and America both are on the same page with Iran.
They're probably people who welcome like a kind of a more of a Cold War attitude between Russia and the United States over Iran, because it might make the United States more hawkish or more supportive of Israeli military action or things like this is like, I'm being pretty speculative here.
But I think, I think Russia and America have a joint interest in or had a joint interest in bringing Iran back into the family of nations and kind of regulating and supervising or overseeing its nuclear program and not ending it.
And so that ends and Russia and America are at odds over Ukraine or something like that, then, you know, it makes war more likely in, you know, in the Middle East.
Those are three points I would make.
And just generally speaking, I think, you know, Russia is a big, great power.
And I don't think there's, I don't think there's any innate hostility between the American people and the Russian people, nor do we have huge conflicts of interest that are obvious.
So, yeah, I mean, it seems like if you run a hawkish think tank, then okay, yeah, it makes great sense to, you know, try to relive your Cold War, your days and all that.
But if Pat Buchanan can put in writing and come on this show and talk about how, oh, Russia?
Yeah, well, you see, Russia is not the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union is dead and gone and their military, the Red Army does not exist.
And they do not occupy the, you know, dozen nations on their periphery that they used to occupy.
And those days are gone.
We do not have to have this kind of conflict.
If that's good enough for Pat, that ought to be good enough for anybody on the right or left or anywhere on the political spectrum in America, right?
Pat is absolutely right about that.
But there's a lot of Cold War nostalgia for, or, you know, I think people in Washington often need to feel important and need to feel that they're, you know, engaged in a big, you know, earth shattering, world important conflict to justify, you know, whatever, you know, their decision making, their getting up in the morning.
And so there are a lot of people in Washington, not just Republicans, who welcome, like, at least a low level Cold War with Russia.
And the idea of just thinking Russia is a great power on the other side of the globe, which would, with whom we have no major conflict of interest, is an anathema to them.
All right, now, we're real short on time.
I guess I want to ask you about Robert Perry's theory that, you know, when he talked about all those interests, Ukraine, other than, sorry, that Ukraine is messing up, but especially Iran and Syria, and our cooperation with Russia being important on those issues.
Robert Perry over at Consortium News seems to think that this is, you know, amounts to some insubordination by the likes of Victoria Nuland, and some of the neocons, and that they're doing this particularly in order to drive a wedge between America and Russia, while we are in the middle of negotiating on Iran and Syria, these two very important issues for them.
And they're getting revenge on Putin for making the chemical weapons deal that prevented the civil or the entry of the American direct intervention into the war in Syria last summer.
And they're trying to screw up the Iran nuclear deal, which is yet to be finalized.
What do you think of that?
I think that's plausible.
And I'm not, I haven't heard that theory before.
But I think it makes a fair amount of sense.
And I'd like to read and think more about it.
I mean, certainly, you know, Victoria Nuland doesn't operate in a vacuum.
She's part of a, you know, kind of large neoconservative policy network, where they kind of, you know, think and act a lot and coordinate in certain ways.
And in subordination, you know, she should not have been, she should not have been, you know, allowed to have been in the square in Maiden Square in Kiev, you know, choosing ministers.
And that's my word, by the way, you know, summarizing Perry, I don't believe he used that term exactly.
So I should be careful.
No, I think that's an interesting theory.
And I, it's a lot of speculation that we should be hearing more about depending on what happens in the weeks to come.
And then real quickly here, I guess we have about a minute and a half, can you talk about the difference of opinion between the Europeans and the Americans about how to proceed from here?
I think you write that the Germans and the British apparently are much less enthusiastic about ramping up this conflict and adding new sanctions, etc.
I mean, so far, when you talk about sanctions, you talk about, you know, they are, I mean, Britain has major, like all the Russian oligarchs, or a lot of them have decamped to London, and bought a lot of properties that are very involved with the financial system.
And Germany gets a very, very large percentage of its energy needs in terms of Russian natural gas.
So they are definitely not eager for, you know, let's have a new Cold War, it would come at financial cost to them, and not necessarily to us.
They can steal more over the long term, if they let these guys stay, I get it.
Yeah.
But I don't think that they're, I mean, I don't think they're comfortable.
I mean, I think they definitely wish that this hadn't happened, you know, starting from, you know, when, and they are in part responsible for the overreach of trying to, you know, bring Ukraine into the EU.
I mean, that's, that's their somewhat assertive step.
And I haven't actually seen some analysis whether, whether they think that, you know, whether Angela Merkel, who should understand Putin pretty well, they come from similar backgrounds, thinks that, you know, maybe, you know, they shouldn't be like trying to move Ukraine away from the Russian orbit.
Anyway, we'll have to stop there.
Thanks so much for your time.
I sure appreciate it, Scott.
Thank you, Scott.
All right.
That's Scott McConnell from the American Conservative Magazine.
He co-founded it, theamericanconservative.com.
On Ukraine, cool the triumphalism, our entirely self-inflicted Ukraine disaster, and push for a new Cold War seems to stall.
Thank goodness.
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