03/18/14 – Jack Matlock – The Scott Horton Show

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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.
My website is ScottHorton.org.
I keep all my interview archives there, more than 3,000 of them now, going back to 2003.
And you can follow me on Twitter at Twitter.com slash Scott Horton Show as well if you want.
Our first guest on the show today is former Ambassador Jack Matlock.
He's a career diplomat, according to Wikipedia, anyway, spent an entire career from the Kennedy administration on dealing with the Soviets and was at least virtually the last ambassador to the USSR.
I'm not certain about that.
Welcome back.
Welcome to the show, Jack.
How are you doing?
Oh, glad to be with you.
Very happy to have you here.
And I think I read at Wikipedia it said that you finally retired from the Foreign Service just a few months before Gorbachev resigned and the USSR finally dissolved on Christmas Day in 1991.
Is that correct?
That is correct.
Yes.
Yes, I retired in 1991.
So it's been a few years.
Yeah.
And so were you, in fact, the last ambassador?
Did they get someone in there before the USSR was gone?
No, Robert Strauss replaced me and so he was ambassador to the Soviet Union for about two and a half, three months before it collapsed.
Ah, you should have hung in there a couple more months.
I'm the last ambassador.
All right.
Well, anyway, so listen, everyone, you should know jackmatlock.com is the website.
He's the author of the books Superpower Illusions, Autopsy on an Empire, and Reagan and Gorbachev.
How the Cold War Ended.
And he's also got a blog there, basically a lot of very interesting articles, especially lately about Ukraine.
And then this one is all important.
You may have seen it in the Washington Post.
It's entitled The U.S. Has Treated Russia Like a Loser Since the End of the Cold War, attempting to provide some necessary historical context for the current conflict.
And I guess if we could really start there, I would ask you about, it seems like you and Paul Pilar and Leslie Gelb and other people who are, you know, pretty official from the foreign policy establishment have really been put in the position of complaining that we're not even basing our policy on an accurate narrative of events, of what's even going on here.
And I think that Leslie Gelb in the Daily Beast complained the most about it, that we're living kind of in an unreality here about just what is taking place in Ukraine, and then we're making apparently bad decisions based on the false narrative.
What do you think of that?
Well, you know, there's a lot to that.
I would say specifically, you know, during the Reagan and the first Bush administrations, we started with the Cold War at its very height.
And it was President Reagan who decided that, look, you know, we really got to bring an end to this.
But he understood he had to do two things.
One thing, he had to make sure we were strong enough to negotiate.
In other words, that he could tell the Soviet leader, let's stop this arms race.
If we don't, we're going to win it.
And but the reason he did that was he wanted to negotiate.
And he also understood that to negotiate, you had to find ways to give the other fellow incentive for doing what you need to do.
And that means you've got to define your aim as one that is not really harmful to them.
Now, at the top of the Cold War, you know, the Soviet Union was following policies that were not in their interest.
You know, they were supporting revolutions elsewhere in the world, they were ruining their economy with arms things, and they had a lousy economy to begin with.
But they were actually doing things that were not in their interest.
And so Reagan was able, even before Gorbachev came to power, to define our interest in a way that we could both win.
And instead of saying, you've got to improve your human rights, he said, let's find a way to cooperate to improve human rights.
He also said another thing to us on the staff before he first met Gorbachev.
He said, we're too upfront on this human rights.
If we, and I'm using his words, if we take it public, we'll get a lot of cheers from the bleachers, but we're going to hurt those we want to help.
We've got to go private, and we can't make the other person think he's doing us a favor to, you know, do the right thing by his own people.
And that's what he did.
We did it step by step.
And everything else, we said, we need to cooperate to reduce arms.
We're both spending too much.
Well, we knew it was hurting them more than us, but we were both spending too much.
And most of all, of course, Reagan did not like nuclear weapons.
You know, he didn't talk about that an awful lot, but he was really basically an abolitionist.
I think he knew in his heart if we were attacked, he couldn't bring himself to kill millions of other people just in retaliation.
And he would say, you know, this mutual assured destruction, this is unacceptable.
In other words, I won't go on and on.
I've done all this in my books.
But we began to find a way to shift into a private dialogue these difficult issues.
And this got to the point, once we began to build trust, and particularly with Gorbachev, who understood that the country couldn't go on like it was, it needed to change, then we helped him change by often not going public with a lot of very emotional issues.
And I go into some of that in my book.
But the point was that you don't just beat up on them without giving them a way out.
And if it's a real emotional issue, you handle it privately.
And you try to handle it in a way that the other guy's got something to gain, too.
And the thing is, we ended the Cold War, and we ended it several years, a couple of years before the Soviet Union collapsed.
We ended it in a way that we both won.
Yeah, we won the Cold War, but they did, too.
Because what did they get?
They got an end to the arms race that was ruining them.
They got an end to the foreign pressure that was helping to sustain a totalitarian system there.
It gave Gorbachev a chance to try to reform it.
And so on.
It was an end to the domination of Eastern Europe, which was a drain to them at the time.
So, yeah, we won the Cold War, and we won it by negotiation.
And then after that, the Soviet Union collapsed of its own accord from internal pressures.
And actually, the Russians, leaders at that time, helped us win the Cold War and actually led the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Now, they thought they were going to be accepted.
They threw off communism, and they thought that suddenly, you know, they're going to be accepted as partners.
And in fact, many people thought, now that we don't have communism, we'll soon be living like Americans.
And they ended up in the 90s with chaos.
And increasingly, the United States, rather than treating Russia as, you know, a potential partner, we, you know, we start doing all sorts of things that the Russians look at as hostile.
And so now, here it is, 22 years later, that we have a situation where our president and their president, the chemistry is so bad that we really can't have these heart-to-heart, you know, discussions privately the way we used to, to work these things out.
As a matter of fact, Putin is using our criticism, much of which is quite valid, but it's done publicly.
And he's using it at home, and he got tremendous applause today when he took Crimea, you know, into, back into Russia, where all Russians have always considered that rightfully part of Russia.
And so he's very, you know, he's increased his popularity, and because of the tension with us.
So I think we should bear these things in mind.
Well, you know, it's funny, people keep wondering, I keep seeing people wonder why the Americans have done it the way they've done it, because it seems so obvious that if they push the Russians too far on an issue like Ukraine, they might just lose the Crimean Peninsula, for one thing, for one example.
And maybe, you know, they're at least risking losing the eastern half of Ukraine, if it really came to that, possibly.
And it seems so predictable that people assume, well, so what is it that they're really after?
You know what I mean?
If it's, if it's not this, is it really just that they're that inept, when it comes to threatening Russia's interests, that they're, they're so one sided in their view, they can't even predict something like, maybe they won't tolerate a second Orange Revolution, a second push and regime change in Ukraine?
Well, you know, I really can't speak for them now.
I think that, you know, the biggest damage was done during the George W. Bush administration.
That eight years, I mean, pulling out of the ABM Treaty when we really didn't have to, continuing to expand NATO, and not only expanding NATO, but moving bases there and talking about them.
That stuff started then, and then it was that administration that started about talking about taking Ukraine into NATO, at a time when two-thirds of the Ukrainians didn't want to be in NATO.
Now, why the United States would want to take on, you know, a guarantee for the protection of a country which was divided, had not, you know, solved its internal problems, and two-thirds of its people didn't want to be protected by the United States?
I don't know.
It just didn't seem to have any rationality at all.
But it was part of the psychology that you get, and, you know, this psychology, it's not a matter of whether it's left or right.
You get some people that think they're liberal and there are others that say they're conservative, and they both think this way, the idea that we're so powerful that we can, you know, we're the only superpower now that the Cold War was over, and therefore we can remake the world in our image.
Well, you know, we are the most powerful country in military, and we can destroy any other country we wish.
But, you know, we don't have the power to reform them, and our form of government is not necessarily the one that is, you know, is best for them.
In any case, of course we would like people to have democracy and prosperous economies and, you know, respect rights, but this is something they have to create for themselves.
And as we learned in Iraq, you can, you know, remove the dictator and so on, and yet you can't put in place something that is going to last that is right for them.
They have to do that.
And frankly, you know, I just feel sorry for, you know, almost 5,000 Americans lost their lives in Iraq.
For what?
And, you know, how many thousands have their lives maimed forever, and we taxpayers are stuck with something that may run close to a trillion dollars because of that war.
And this is one that not only the Russians, but also our friends the French and the Germans told us, don't do it.
You know?
Don't do it.
Not only is it illegal to do it without U.N. approval, and we didn't have it, but you don't have sufficient cause.
And so, you know, but, you know, this is one that's not a particular administration did it, but there is, unfortunately, there are people in both of our parties that seem to think it's our duty to remake the world, or to police it, even if we can't remake it.
I just don't think we can do that.
I don't think the American people want to.
And so I think that's what's behind it.
Now, in the case of the Obama administration, his motivation, I think, is different from Bush's.
We had had 9-11, and, you know, Bush was saying, well, we have to go after, you know, the perpetrators, and that we did, except that Iraq wasn't one of the perpetrators.
But now it's a matter of humanitarian intervention, the idea that, you know, if people are suffering in another country, and their government is going after them, we have to do something to protect them.
Now, you know, I think there's something to that, and I would say that, you know, I think that we need an international structure of, you know, of volunteers that, with international approval, U.N. approval, can go into countries and do that.
But I don't think that's something that is the duty of the United States.
And when we try to do it alone, or just insist that others come along with us and we take the lead, others think that we're just doing it for imperialistic purposes.
And I'm sure, you know, the people that argue that, often they have no real military experience, and they mean well.
But, you know, if we take Syria today, you know, there's no way we can keep the government from killing its own people without putting our people there and getting shot at.
And even then, what are we going to get if we take out the Syrian government?
You know, you could get something worse.
So I sympathize with people that say, you know, something ought to be done.
But I would say, look, let's be realistic about what we can do and can't do.
And for goodness sakes, don't get our people involved in other people's disputes.
We should have more respect for our young people in the military than to put them in, you know, in the crossfire of other people.
And I'm afraid that's what there's been a tendency to do.
And that's not a partisan thing, because you find both Republicans and Democrats that follow that logic.
All right, now, I want to get back to the current situation in Crimea and some of the background history, too, here.
First of all, apparently, I've read a report, I haven't read the book, but it's been reported that in Robert Gates' memoirs, his new book, Duty that has come out, that he recounts that at the fall of the Soviet Union, Dick Cheney, who was George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense at the time, that he wanted to, he doesn't specify, I don't think, not quite Patton, like rolling tanks all the way to Moscow, but he wanted to dismember Russia, not just the Soviet Union.
Dick Cheney wanted to break Russia into as many pieces as he possibly could.
And I wonder whether this is really just that same Cheney-ite, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby strategy from 1991, playing itself out, maybe kind of in slow motion, but it's that, you know, never mind good sportsmanship, we're going to take Russia apart.
It'll never be anything like the Soviet Union ever again.
Yeah, well, I can't testify that that was his idea.
I mean, Gates would know, presumably, but, you know, it's a fairly bad idea.
You know, there was also, during World War II, there was the idea we should take Germany apart, so it could never be a threat again.
Well, you know, that really wasn't, you were not going to be able to keep the Germans apart, necessarily, and when you tried, you'd get into all sorts of problems.
So what we did instead, and I think rightly so, was to set up NATO, which was not only set up in order to protect us from the Soviet Union or to protect Europe, but in order to keep the Germans under control, to let them rearm, and then later, when they united the two German states, let them be in the integrated NATO alliance and not sort of an independent actor that could start pushing their way around too much in Europe.
And I think that was very wise, and that's one of the reasons we needed to keep NATO, even when the Cold War was over.
But the idea that you're going to break up Russia, Russia is, in many ways, a wonderful country with wonderful people.
They have had a series of terrible governments, some worse than others, but they're survivors.
And, you know, you can't have better allies, and it's not a good idea to make enemies of them.
So I think that the idea that somehow just being Russia was creating a problem is absolutely wrong.
You know, when you look at World War II, well, you know, it was Germany that invaded Russia.
During the Napoleonic times, it was Napoleon and the French.
They'd been invaded many times, and I'll tell you, you know, in most of these wars, we and Russia were on the same side.
When you think about it, Russia is the only big country that we have never had a war with.
Maybe France also, but, you know, there have been skirmishes there.
And that should tell us something about we don't really have any strong conflicting national interests.
That's a very good point.
Now, I want to ask you, too, about this Reuters piece that says that Lavrov and Kerry agree to work on constitutional reform in Ukraine.
In other words, stronger federalism, less power for the central government.
Is that basically just code for America backing down finally, like they never should have stood up in the first place?
I don't know what extent it's backing down.
Of course, I don't know what our position was before, but I think it's a good thing.
I think it's just logical that with all the differences in Ukraine, the different people, they need a federal system.
One of their problems has been that they have a centralized government, and you had, you know, you had groups that would win an election by 51%, and then they'd be winner-take-all.
The president appointing all the governors and whatnot, even though only slightly more than half the people had voted for him, and almost nobody in some of the areas.
So, yeah, I think they need a constitution that gives their provinces at least as much independence as our states have.
You know, federalism works in the United States, and we argue about it a lot, but basically it works, and I think that should be a no-brainer.
And if we stood against it before, we were simply wrong, and it's good that we are changing our mind.
Well, now, it seems to me, and I'm sure you've considered this too, that America's relationship with Russia is really the most important thing in the history of all of humanity.
I mean, the Chinese have a few dozen nukes, and I guess it could come down to a war between us and Britain or France someday in some indeterminate future, but the real risk to mankind, even Pakistan and India have limited nuclear arsenals, the real risk to the future of civilization is America and Russia's arsenals of H-bombs.
And it seems like people just forget about it.
They think that the nukes disappeared when the Cold War disappeared or something.
It's the lowest on the list of priorities for the Americans, it seems, but I can't think of anything more important than America and Russia staying on good terms no matter what, especially when, like Pat Buchanan said on the show last week, the communist ideology is over.
We're not having to worry about that anymore.
This is just Russia, and we can deal with Russia.
Pat is absolutely right about that.
He's been right about a lot of things recently.
But yeah, that's right.
We have about the same number of nuclear weapons.
Too many in both cases, and we still need to work on bringing them down.
But you're absolutely right.
People are talking about, oh, there used to be two superpowers.
Now there's only one, the United States.
I say, now wait a minute.
What makes you a superpower?
Is it nuclear weapons?
Well, I'll tell you one thing.
There is no rational military use for nuclear weapons, number one.
And number two, it would be crazy to use them, particularly against another country that has them.
Number three, they can destroy, but they can't build anything.
Therefore, national power really should be measured in other ways.
But as long as we have them, we have to make darn sure they're not used.
You know, I get a little worried when I hear all this, you know, all options are on the table.
You know, when we're talking about Iran or some of the other things.
And they mean also military action.
I'll tell you, to end the Cold War, the first thing in their first meeting that Reagan and Gorbachev did was take the option of war off the table.
They both agreed to a statement, which had originated by Reagan, saying a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, and that means there can be no war between us.
Now, you know, so you start by both sides taking that completely off the table.
And that's the only rational thing to do.
Now, you know, but the idea of treating Russia, I know at one point one of my friends, General Lowdam, unfortunately is not with us anymore.
But, you know, he was making statements in the 90s, well, Russia is upper vocal with nukes.
Now, that's ridiculous.
But that sort of disrespect, sure, they had a system that was more like anarchy, and everybody, most everybody was suffering from the transition.
But the fact was that, you know, it is a large country, enormous resources, and particularly the human resources.
Well-trained people, brilliant scientists, and so on.
As I said, they have suffered from lousy government.
That's true.
And I think, you know, in time, they're going to correct some of that.
I say, you know, we face a lot of international issues today.
Terrorism, deterioration of the environment, spread of disease.
These are threats that don't come necessarily from countries, but they're general and they threaten us all.
Now, in solving those, Russia is either going to be part of the solution or part of the problem.
You know, when we just pick fights with them, as we seem to be doing now, we're making them part of the problem instead of part of the solution.
I do think that we have to understand that, you know, whether we like what another leader is doing in his country or not, it's really not our business to try to teach them democracy.
I mean, they'll find their way to a system.
Many of them want to improve theirs now, but they can do it much better if we are, you know, somewhat understanding and particularly respectful.
Right.
I'm sorry, Ambassador.
Sorry.
No, no, I'm sorry.
I just have to interrupt you.
We're over time and we have to go to our next guest.
I want to thank you so much for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
Great to be with you.
Jack F. Matlock.
His website is jackmatlock.com.
He was almost the last ambassador to the Soviet Union and he's got this piece in the Washington Post.
The US has treated Russia like a loser since the end of the Cold War and many more good articles at jackmatlock.com.
Please check that out and we're over time, but we'll be right back with Gareth Porter in just a sec.
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