04/10/14 – Daniel Larison – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest on the show today is Daniel Larrison.
He writes at the American Conservative Magazine.
That's theamericanconservative.com slash Larrison.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Daniel?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
That's good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
I always like reading your stuff and, well, I always like anything really sane about America's policy in Eastern Europe.
And you've got that in spades here.
Thank goodness.
So I'll ask people again to please go look at theamericanconservative.com slash Larrison.
I guess, first of all, the facts.
Can we talk about the latest developments with the cities and the unrest in eastern Ukraine?
And can I ask you what you think may come of that?
And then maybe we can talk about, well, a lot of other aspects.
Sure.
Well, you've seen a number of demonstrations or uprisings, or at least what seem to be uprisings in some of the cities in eastern Ukraine, particularly Donetsk, where they have declared their own self-defense forces, so-called self-defense forces.
And in Donetsk, at least, they've declared a revival of an old post-revolutionary independent republic, which, of course, nobody recognizes at this point.
It's basically just a few people in one building at the moment.
But there's clearly unrest.
There's clearly a lot of anti-government sentiments in terms of being opposed to the people who have taken over in Kiev.
And there's reason to think that the Russians are stoking this and encouraging it.
If you only give the people in Kiev a headache and to create a problem for them, to create a situation where they either have to suppress these demonstrations with force, as they threaten to do, or allow the eastern half of the country to gradually drift out of their control.
Meanwhile, the Russians do have large numbers of soldiers on the border that are at least potentially there, or at least they're there to threaten the possibility of Russian intervention.
But I think nobody really knows for sure one way or the other how far into Ukraine Russian forces would actually go if they were to do that, or if they would try to do it covertly, as they did in Crimea.
Meanwhile, the situation in Ukraine overall is not good economically.
They're on the verge of default, and there doesn't seem to be anything, even economic aid from the West, that would prevent that at this point.
So they're going to be starting from the bottom up one way or the other in the entire country there.
And then I guess, you know, all the industry in the east, that was a big part of the argument over the trade agreement, right, was that basically the trade agreement would end the protectionism for the old industry in the east, and they'd basically be wiped out by competition with more efficient European producers and that kind of stuff.
And here they're already on their last legs as it is.
That was meant to, or at least in effect, it would have killed off what little economy they even had left.
Is that about right?
At least in the short term.
Well, yeah, the association agreement with the EU would have made conditions very difficult for Ukrainian industry, and then the Russian response to that agreement would have compounded the problem because most of Ukraine's markets for those goods are in Russia.
So Russia has an interest in continuing that supply to them, but they were also willing to impose trade sanctions in order to penalize Ukraine for pursuing that association agreement.
So if that had in fact gone ahead, then Ukrainian industry would be deprived of one of its largest markets.
So in terms of the near-term economic future of Ukraine, it looks very bad.
Of course, the Russians have just said that they're contemplating cutting off gas supplies on account of the fact that the Ukrainians have not paid their gas bills for some time, and are in fact in no position to pay them because they owe too much money and they don't have nearly enough.
So it's a number of things that are coming together at the same time that are making their economic and financial situation untenable.
All right.
Now, as far as the Russian soldiers on the other side of Ukraine's eastern border there, obviously a lot has been made of it from a lot of different competing sources, and numbers have gone as high as 100,000, and then other reports have seemed to say that not much has changed really as far as the numbers of Russian soldiers stationed near the Ukrainian border right there.
Can you tell me what's the best sense you can make of what's going on there, or what kind of likelihood you think there might be that they will cross that border?
From what I've seen, the conservative estimate is that there is something on the order of 30,000 to 40,000 on the eastern border.
And as far as I know, that's about as high as it goes.
To the extent that there is any consensus about what may be about to happen, at least from the Russian perspective, it's much better for them to try to stir things up through the use of covert operations and then special forces and intelligence operatives to keep things churning and to keep political unrest going as long as possible to make things harder on the new government in Kiev.
But I don't, and of course we may be proven wrong about this, but I don't think it makes sense for them from their own perspective to wade into what would become a guerrilla war potentially if they actually sent their regular forces in large numbers.
There's no reason, in a sense they don't need to do that because they already have enough other levers to influence the situation without going that far.
Yeah, I mean that makes sense to me if I try to put myself in Putin's position.
He's gotten the Crimea thing locked down nice and easy.
No point in pushing it, but then again I guess, well, so then the question is how far would America have to push it or would the new junta in Kiev have to push it to provoke them into actually coming across?
Because of course the people, some of the protesters in the east were saying, well, hey, we want a referendum.
We want to vote just like the Crimeans on independence or a protectorate status with Russia and we want Russian peacekeepers to come and protect us.
You know, that's the kind of thing any politician loves to hear is that his soldiers are being invited somewhere.
You know what I mean?
Oh, sure.
And yeah, that could provide a pretext for coming in.
But I think the only thing that would actually trigger a Russian intervention is if a large attempt to suppress these demonstrations took place.
So if the Ukrainian government refrains from that kind of crackdown, which would be desirable in and of itself, it would also avoid giving the Russians that pretext to come across the border because they will claim that now the abuses of the Russian-speaking population are taking place and they're there to stop them.
So really the key, as far as the Ukrainian government is concerned, is not to give them that pretext.
And as long as the Russians can't at least dress it up somewhat plausibly as intervening on behalf of people who are being attacked, they probably won't come across.
All right.
Well, so I won't waste your time with having you debunk the theory that, you know, just Putin's aggressive nationalism caused all of this.
Obviously, it's a situation of blowback created by the Western powers here.
But I wonder, why do they keep pushing it in Ukraine?
I mean, I can see the whole rebuilding America's defenses strategy for just conquering as much of the world as you can and incorporating it as much as you can into your alliances or whatever.
But at the same time, it seems like, you know, these guys all went to fancy schools and stuff.
They've got to know that they can only push things so far, like a second color revolution in Kiev in 10 years, you know?
Well, you'd think that they would know that there are limits to what can be done and what Russia will put up with.
But I think we've seen, in fact, that they aren't aware of that.
And they don't really give any credence to Russian complaints or the possibility of Russian retaliation, because as far as they're concerned, anything that Russia does to push back, they will declare illegitimate and will therefore justify even more aggressive measures from our side.
So in that sense, I don't think they see a problem with what's been going on in that it justifies the push into the former Soviet Union that so many of these people have been advocating all along.
I'm not saying, well, look, we're the stabilizing force.
We're the benevolent force.
That's how they convince themselves that what they're doing makes sense.
When, indeed, looking at the results over the last four or five months, enormous instability has resulted from trying to force Ukraine to join one camp or another, which is why I think the solution that still makes the most sense is to try to come up with some arrangement that guarantees Ukrainian neutrality and doesn't try to force it into one camp or the other, because obviously neither faction or neither side has enough support within Ukraine to make it stick.
Right.
In fact, I mean, that's what the Obama administration has said they want to do, right?
I mean, it's been a couple of weeks since John Kerry, at least in principle, conceded that they needed to rewrite the Constitution or something.
And I'm sorry, I'm only just realizing we've got to go out to break in 10 seconds here, Daniel.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative right after this, y'all.
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All right, sorry about that.
Dang commercial breaks.
They're on a timer here.
Well, this is the Scott Horton Show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative magazine.
And we're talking about the situation in Ukraine here.
And I guess one of these headlines I X'd out this morning, I never really got a chance to read, I don't think, Daniel, but said that the Americans are saying that they don't put much hope in any upcoming talks with the Russians about what to do in Ukraine.
And I guess I just wonder whether you think, I mean, because what you just said is so obviously true, right, that if you want to hold the state together, well, then, you know, embrace more federalism, and then there's less to fight about.
You know, that's pretty simple.
It's an obvious solution.
I think Kerry has more or less conceded that in one or the other of his statements anyway.
So I guess what are the odds you're placing on it?
Is the momentum with a solution as obvious as this one, perhaps?
Well, I don't think so, for a couple of reasons.
One, whatever hints our officials may have given such that a federalized Ukraine might be a way out of this crisis, there is strong resistance in Washington and in a lot of Western capitals to the idea that great powers negotiate over how Ukraine will govern itself.
It's not that they're, of course, averse to interfering in the internal affairs of other states, as we know, but in this case they're maintaining the fiction that great powers don't engage in this sort of behavior anymore, and so it's inappropriate for this sort of deal to be struck.
Yeah, only unilaterally, right?
But you don't negotiate with third parties over it.
That's in bad form, I understand.
And so there is an added obstacle that the people currently running the Ukrainian government wouldn't agree to that.
They seize control of the federal government.
They want to keep a strong federal government relative to what the federalized proposal would allow.
So they're not interested in ceding power to the eastern part of Ukraine, which perversely is giving people in eastern Ukraine more of an incentive to look for outside support for their own interests.
So I don't think you can get the current government or the western part of the country to sign off on a federalized arrangement, and I don't think you're going to get a lot of western governments, at least not right now, to agree to Ukrainian neutrality.
You still have a lot of people making irresponsible noises about trying to bring Ukraine into NATO, of all things.
So if anything, the mood in western capitals is running in the opposite direction, away from that sort of compromise, because they consider any compromise with the Russians at this point to be illegitimate or even immoral, maybe.
Or that's what they will say.
So there's going to be an honest resistance to any sort of compromise deal that might prevent further instability and violence.
Well, so, you know, I don't know.
There probably is, right?
Some bureaucrat's last name has this metric named after him kind of thing.
But is there a way to count just how much of a central state exists in eastern Ukraine now that this regime change has taken place?
I mean, to what extent is the military and the police force and whatever other of their centralized bureaucracies, you know, still really in operation there?
Because I'm reading about, you know, uprisings of one kind or another, massive protests in quite a few towns there.
And I just want – well, I'm hoping to not see anybody fight about it.
But I wonder if it's the kind of thing where the people of the east, outside of governmental power, have the ability to kind of form up militias and fight.
The way, in fact, we saw in the west, you know, with the neo-Nazis fighting on the streets and seizing the government buildings.
I don't know how much further they could have taken it than that.
But anyway, I don't – we'd all hate to see eastern Ukraine turn into the lawless Anbar province where just everybody's killing each other for a few years.
Well, I think you're seeing sort of start of that in terms of the formation of what they're calling self-defense forces in some of these cities.
How much central government control has completely broken down, I'm not sure.
But you are seeing, to some extent, a mirror image of the seizure of regional and local government buildings that we saw in western and central Ukraine prior to the order of the president.
So the central government does seem to have a limited ability to wield control over these regional centers when the people controlling that central government are as deeply distrusted or even loathed as first Yanukovych and now this group has been.
All right.
Now, so on the question of America messing around over there and wanting so badly to bring Ukraine into NATO, it would seem like this entire crisis fomented by whoever, no matter what we're talking about here, would be reason number one why not to expand – certainly not to expand NATO to include Ukraine.
But it ought to also bring up major questions about just what kind of commitment we really have to the rest of the countries in eastern Europe.
I keep reading people talk about the cities, the capital cities.
People refer to countries by the name of the capital city, like Washington says this, Moscow replies that or whatever.
But they're talking about the capitals of Latvia and Estonia and these places.
I've never even heard of these cities and yet the Democrats and the Republicans have signed me up to trade Austin, Texas for them if it comes down to it.
And I just wonder – I mean most people just kind of shrug that off and say just because we put those countries in NATO doesn't mean we would really defend them.
But I worry that we might actually defend them if it came down to that.
What if Putin decided to call our bluff?
Well, that is one of the dangerous things about past rounds of NATO expansion is that it went ahead without really thinking about what we would have to do if, in fact, it ever came to a point where Russia challenged that security guarantee.
So I think in that case, unfortunately, if Russia thinks that our guarantees to some of those countries, especially the Baltics, don't mean very much, then we could end up spiraling into a conflict that we certainly don't want and we don't need.
It would be a disaster for everyone involved.
So the worry is because it is such a disastrous outcome for all concerned that there would be doubt on the part of the Russians that it would actually be honored in the breach.
My sense is that as long as we don't try to make commitments that go beyond the ones that we already have, as long as we limit our security guarantees to the countries that are already in NATO, then that will actually remove an incentive for the Russians to cause trouble because one thing they simply will not allow is the further expansion of the alliance into their periphery.
And indeed, we saw in 2008 that that was one of the major reasons why they helped to provoke the crisis with a helping hand from Saakashvili, of course, because they very much wanted to keep Georgia out of NATO and Saakashvili played right into that plan.
And I think Georgia will never join now as a result of that.
And so as long as we don't overextend our commitments and at least honor the ones that we've already made, I think that's probably the best way to keep things from spinning out of control.
Sorry if I was a bit disjointed.
No, no, no.
That's right.
So I guess then would you say wait a little while and maybe then start disbanding NATO?
You don't want to start disbanding NATO in response to this crisis, I think you mean.
But I mean, do we need this alliance for the long term?
I think to me as a political matter right now, it will be much, much harder to make arguments for the dissolution of NATO than it would have been just a year or two ago.
Because now a large number of governments that belong to NATO see the value in having it as a defensive alliance again.
The good news may be that because they're remembering that it was designed as a defensive alliance, it will stop NATO from getting us into or using NATO as a platform for getting involved in other wars outside of Europe.
And then so that may be one good outcome out of all of this.
But the danger is I think that we're going to see calls for more of a military buildup in Eastern Europe and more military spending and the redeployment of American forces to Europe.
And I think all of those things would be mistaken and shouldn't be pursued.
I think the thing to be looking at in the long term is to find a way for the U.S. to hand off defense responsibilities to the Europeans themselves and to minimize our exposure to their conflicts.
Well, a lot of it is just politics.
Right.
I remember Thatcher coming to the defense of NATO when France and Germany were talking about creating an EU army back in the 1990s.
And she was saying, no, no, no, we have to keep it NATO.
And, you know, because obviously her interest was having the Americans and the British as the head of the alliance and keeping all of, you know, France and Germany and everybody else in line at old Europe.
Right.
We got them surrounded.
And oh, but no, they're our allies and we love them and we cooperate with them in this great alliance that they're part of, too.
But it's it's made to constrain their choices in a lot of ways in the first place.
Right.
Well, and I think the bigger concern for people that want the U.S. to have an active role in NATO and to keep NATO growing is to make sure that the U.S. doesn't remove itself from European affairs as much as I think would make sense at this point.
The famous saying is that it was created to keep the Germans down, the Russians out, and the Americans in.
There you go.
I didn't realize that was a famous saying.
That's a good one.
I'm sorry.
That's right.
He was a secretary general of NATO.
And he was saying that because there was a fear that the Americans would want to go home and leave European defense to the Europeans.
And certainly at this point, that makes far more sense than continuing to maintain the fiction or the idea that the U.S. is a European power, as many of our politicians will often say.
Right.
I mean, in fact, none of the European powers or the American power, for that matter, need all this military anyway.
None of us face any actual threats to our own countries at this point.
So the whole thing is kind of moot.
If you look at it that way, it seems like to me.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
We're out of time.
Thanks very much for your time, Daniel.
Thanks, Scott.
All right.
That's Daniel Larrison.
The American conservative dot com slash Larrison.
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