11/03/14 – John Feffer – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee.
Lots of it.
And you probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee, company at darrenscoffee.com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world.
All specialty, premium grade, with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren's Coffee.
Order now at darrenscoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and save two dollars.
Darren'scoffee.com.
All right, Shel, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
So today's first guest, it's our friend Jon Pfeffer from Foreign Policy in Focus, fpif.org.
And he's got this article, NATO Rebellion in the Ranks.
Welcome back to the show, Jon.
How are you?
Hi, thanks for having me on the show again, Scott.
Very happy to have you back on.
Now, so here's the thing.
You got this wannabe Stalin or wannabe Hitler or something like that.
This Vladimir Putin, this long time serving autocrat, right wing, ranchivist, something, something, whatever that means.
And he's going to take over all of Europe again.
And so America, the guarantor of global collective security, has rallied the countries of Eastern Europe together.
And they have, you know, obviously they see it America's way.
And so have all fallen in lockstep behind America's renewed attempt to contain and isolate and sanction the would-be new Soviet Union.
And so what's the problem?
Well, Eastern Europe doesn't quite see it that way.
I mean, they are a narrow band of countries between Western Europe and the former Soviet Union.
And they're in a pretty vulnerable position there.
And they are not happy about the possibility of a new Cold War developing.
And so they have pushed back against some of the sanctions that the United States and Europe have proposed and have followed through with on Russia.
And they are not entirely enthusiastic about NATO pushing hard to the east.
So that's the dilemma we're dealing with right now.
The United States is not so happy about the ambivalence that Eastern European countries have been showing.
Well, what do we require of them?
Well, it depends.
Number one, we're looking for strong support for economic sanctions against Russia.
But for a lot of countries and the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, these countries in part depend on economic trade with Russia.
They also have a great dependency on energy coming from the former Soviet Union, from Russia.
And they're also concerned that a freezing of economic relations between the West and the East would be a devastating blow on their own economies, since they depend very much on being in this pivotal spot between East and West.
So that's one thing, the economic sanctions.
The other thing is the military question.
And, you know, President Obama was in Estonia, one of the Baltic countries up the north, recently.
And he basically was encouraging the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe more generally to help Ukraine, basically Kiev, the government in Kiev, either by providing economic assistance or some military assistance.
And there is some ambivalence there, too.
I mean, even Poland.
Poland has been perhaps the greatest supporter of Ukraine and one of the most suspicious of Vladimir Putin's motives.
But even Poland has said, well, look, you know, we really should be focusing a little bit more on our security.
Now, that doesn't mean that Poland is, you know, abandoning NATO.
In fact, the new Polish prime minister, Ewa Kopacz, has renewed calls for NATO stationed troops in Poland.
And Poland just recently has reoriented its own army away from its western border and towards its eastern border.
But still, at the same time, Ewa Kopacz, the new prime minister, said, well, you know, we really are not capable by ourselves of taking on Russia.
And we have to make sure that we put Polish security first.
So that, I think, has put a damper a little bit on Poland's eagerness, shall we say, to support Ukraine overwhelmingly with economic and military assistance.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this isn't really the direction I wanted to go here, but I have to comment on that and ask you about that.
It seems like all over the place we hear references to what it would take for who or what combination of who's to take on Russia.
When Russia, I thought, by definition, is unattackable or even, you know, no one can fight a war.
If Poland was invaded by Russia, their leaders' real only priority would be to surrender quickly so that the Russians don't kill all of them with hydrogen bombs.
And so that sucks for them.
It sucks to be from Poland and dominated by your giant hydrogen bomb-wielding neighbor, the Russians or whatever.
But anyone would rather surrender than have their nation completely wiped off the face of the planet with H-bombs.
So, you know, Poland and what army?
America, Britain, France, Germany and everybody else are going to fight a nuclear war against Russia to keep them out of Poland?
I don't think so.
I think, I mean, in the Reagan years the line, as Pat Buchanan always says, in the Reagan years the line was West Berlin and the Elbe River.
And now you want the line to be literally like, you know, Latvia or Poland?
It's crazy.
Well, regardless of what you or I prefer, these countries are now in NATO.
So that means there is a security guarantee.
In other words, if Russia were to attack Poland, they would invoke the NATO Charter and everybody would come to the defense of Poland.
Is that really guaranteed, do you think?
Or might they just say, forget you, I mean, really?
Are we going to trade all our states' biggest cities for them, for Warsaw?
Well, I don't actually want to put it to a test.
And I don't think Russia is willing to put it to a test either.
Russia doesn't have any territorial interests in Poland at the moment.
It doesn't have any territorial interests in any of the Eastern European countries.
Russia has been pretty narrowly concerned in what it calls the near abroad.
And that includes, you know, this revived idea of Novorossiya, which includes parts of Ukraine.
Russia has been narrowly focused on the areas around its borders where large numbers of Russians live.
In some cases, you know, the countries where large numbers of Russians live have acted preemptively.
For instance, Kazakhstan.
Kazakhstan went out of its way to basically say, we're guaranteeing the language and cultural rights of our ethnic Russians within Kazakhstan's borders.
And so Russia doesn't have that card to play.
I can't say it's coming to the defense of Russians in Kazakhstan, because there's nothing to defend.
The issue, of course, right now is Ukraine and the ethnic Russians or Russian speakers in the eastern part of Ukraine.
But it's not just Ukraine.
There is, of course, the Baltics.
It will probably be the more likely place where there might be a conflict, because there are large numbers of Russians who live in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
So that, I think, is perhaps the place where this nuclear scenario might occur.
Although, again, you know, I don't think Russia is interested in taking on the West or NATO per se.
Again, it has had relatively narrow security interests in mind.
Yeah, well, you know, here's the thing about that.
That would make sense if there was really such a thing as the Russian state.
But really, it is just humans over there.
And you look at Putin, I mean, he is a politician.
And that's, I mean, you can't get worse than that.
So it seems like any politician, any other politician in his same position, provided they had the ability, would be expansionist and try to seek as much power as they possibly could, right?
That's what the American politicians do all day.
So what's keeping him from wanting to be expansionist?
Like you say, he's not even interested in it.
Well, that's a good question.
And, you know, Putin is old enough to know that the Russian state and previously the Soviet state expanded at its own risk, at its own peril.
In other words, it would only get territory successfully or manage territory successfully if it could actually control that territory.
The war in Afghanistan was a devastating impact on the Russian psyche, the Soviet psyche demonstrated.
And in some sense, Russians could not control an area where there wasn't a large Russian-speaking population.
All right, hold it right there, John.
Sorry, we've got to take this break.
We'll be right back with John Pfeffer, fpif.org.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
If this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable, and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy and Focus.
We're talking about, well, Ukraine, but really America, Russia, NATO, and everybody stuck in between us.
And so I was kind of playing dumb there and saying, well, why wouldn't Putin want to take over all of Europe?
After all, Russia used to rule Eastern Europe for 50, 60, 70 years there, whatever.
So anyway, so he said, yeah, because they can't.
That's why not.
And because Putin ain't stupid.
So, okay, that makes a lot of sense.
But so is the Washington Post editorial board stupid or are they just liars?
Because they keep telling me that I have to be afraid because Russia is coming for me, that everything we got to do in Eastern Europe is to contain their menace, just like the old days.
Well, I think what the Washington Post is up to, at least its opinion columnists, Ann Applebaum and David, I can't remember the other guy's name.
Jackson Deal.
Yes, Jackson Deal, exactly.
They are interested in stiffening the backbone of Eastern Europeans.
In other words, they perceive that there's some wavering on the eastern edge of NATO, and they want to say, hey, look, this is not acceptable.
The United States basically is not going to tolerate this kind of ambivalence.
It's fine for you guys to mess around with your own economies and even your own politics.
And certainly Hungary is an example of a country that has moved in the direction of illiberalism, as Viktor Orban has called it.
But it's quite another thing for you guys to team up with Russia, as Hungary has been doing, and another as well for Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Romania and Bulgaria, to show some kind of hesitancy when it comes to applying economic sanctions or supporting NATO's efforts on the Eastern Front.
So I think that's their issue.
It's not a question so much of whether they're stupid or whether they're lying.
It's really a question of how they massage the news, which is essentially what a columnist has decided to do.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's just that everything that they write over there at The Washington Post pretty much is about how everybody's a threat, and that's why our aggressive behavior is justified.
So after a longstanding pattern, I guess, yeah, maybe they're all strung out on crank and just absolutely paranoid out of their minds, or maybe they're dishonest, or maybe they just don't care what the truth is.
I'm not sure exactly how it works.
But I've known people before who were strung out on crank and who were as paranoid as Ann Applebaum, for example.
Well, you know, I think there is a low-level degree of paranoia that you would find at The Washington Post.
And, you know, it's been overtaken by other events.
I mean, certainly the Islamic State has been the force that has replaced Vladimir Putin as the general source of paranoia for the American foreign policy establishment.
And for the general public, I suspect it would be Ebola.
And so Putin has been reduced in his stature as a major threat.
But for the folks in Europe, it's another matter, because they're perhaps less focused on what's going on in Syria, and they haven't been dealing with Ebola so much.
And so the issue of Ukraine is still front and center.
It's still the issue for NATO at the moment.
So both Jackson Deal and Applebaum have focused a great deal on Europe.
They are Atlanticists.
They believe that the U.S.-European relationship, the NATO relationship, is still the kind of cornerstone of American foreign policy.
So for them, you know, NATO lives and dies, frankly, by the threat that Russia poses.
If Russia no longer poses a threat, if, for instance, Putin were replaced tomorrow by someone like Yeltsin, someone who had basically the same foreign policy, but was much more conciliatory toward the United States, then NATO again would have this kind of crisis, this existential crisis with no quite what to do with itself other than out-of-area operations like Afghanistan, northern Africa.
But its purpose and shrine in its charter is Europe and borders of Europe.
So if you remove the threat from the borders of Europe, then NATO starts to wander.
And by the way, when Kerry and Lavrov had that meeting recently, did that signal that there was, well, what did that signal, anything?
Well, not a great deal.
I mean, obviously, you know, the Obama administration would very much like to get some kind of an agreement with Russia to settle the Ukraine issue.
And it is, as several commentators have pointed out, not a terribly difficult issue to settle if you kind of establish some kind of autonomy for the folks in eastern Ukraine.
But increasingly, that has not been something either Moscow or Washington have been able to negotiate.
So that meeting between Kerry and Lavrov basically hasn't gone anywhere.
So that's the challenge at the moment for Washington to the extent that it's paying any attention to Ukraine.
And meanwhile, on the ground in Ukraine, I mean, the folks in eastern Ukraine held an election.
Folks in western section of Ukraine also had their election.
And the situation on the ground has become more polarized because the folks in the east were not voting in the elections in the west, more pro-European, shall we say.
Factions won in the national Ukrainian election.
And we have more separatist-oriented folks coming out of basically, well, one-candidate elections in the east.
So unfortunately, these elections have divided the country even more.
So it's become a little bit more difficult to negotiate that solution.
Well, and there's still people being killed there.
That's correct.
Even though there are so-called ceasefires on the ground, fighting still takes place.
I think both sides are trying to assess whether it's actually feasible to have a, quote-unquote, military solution, when in fact it's, of course, not feasible to have a military solution.
It's basically a deadlock in terms of the balance of forces.
So it's just a question of when to get these folks to the table, when to negotiate some kind of solution.
Ukraine, the government in Kiev, is reluctant to see the country partitioned, and understandably so.
The forces in eastern Ukraine, well, it's a toss-up between folks on the ground who basically are somewhat scared of Kiev and want to make sure that their lifestyle is protected, and the fighters, some of whom are actually just imported from Russia and have an entirely different perspective.
So it's a tough situation to negotiate.
Yeah.
Well, but now I want to go back to something you said there about how, well, I forget your exact words, but something along the lines of the power on the ground has already sort of sorted itself out.
We're really just waiting for the negotiation.
So if I understand you right, you're referring to the fact that the Russian-backed militias there in the east, they basically stopped the government's attempt to drive them out of their positions in those eastern towns, and they drove the government back, and the government quit trying, at least for now at that point, and basically has had to recognize some level of autonomy.
Now it's just a matter of fine-tuning the level of autonomy, and if they can't, it'll be full secession.
Is that what you're saying?
Basically.
I mean, you know, we're heading into winter, and there's not going to be any military attempts, I think, during the winter for one side or the other to gain the upper hand.
But you're absolutely correct that the government really thought over the summer that it could basically defeat the rebels, and they would push back, basically, because the rebels have some hardware support from Russia.
So there is a deadlock on the ground, and the question really is whether the rebel forces in the east will accept something short of secession.
And that really depends.
I mean, I do think there are some, shall we say, sensible folks in the east who are willing to come to a political negotiation, but there are others who, frankly, want to see the end of Ukraine, and this is simply a kind of strategy that they're using, not so much for secession.
I mean, ruling this area of eastern Ukraine is not within their capabilities, frankly.
They're simply seeing it as a tool to dislodge folks from Kiev and bring the whole country down.
And that, obviously, is a non-negotiable position.
So it's really a question of isolating those folks and somehow bringing the compromising faction to the table and getting some kind of solution.
All right.
Well, good luck.
When I'm president, you'll be Secretary of State.
Thanks, John.
Thank you, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right.
That's John Feffer, y'all.fpif.org.
NATO.
Rebellion in the ranks?
Right back.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here.
I want to tell you about this great new book, Live in La Vida Baroca, American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies, by Thomas Harrington.
While he comes from the left, Harrington has little time for much of what is passed off under that label today.
Like us libertarians, he puts peace and freedom first.
The book's got great essays on American fascism, empire, the Israeli occupation, the left and Obama, liberalism in the state, and some interesting lessons from the history of imperial Spain.
Live in La Vida Baroca by Thomas Harrington.
Check it out at scotthorton.org slash books or scotthorton.org slash Amazon.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Edited by libertarian purist Sheldon Richman, The Future of Freedom brings you the best of our movement.
Featuring articles by Richman, Jacob Hornberger, James Bovard, and many more, The Future of Freedom stands for peace and liberty and against our criminal world empire and Leviathan State.
Subscribe today.
It's just $25 per year for the back-pocket-sized print edition, $15 per year to read it online.
That's The Future of Freedom at fff.org slash subscribe.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
This part of The Scott Horton Show is sponsored by audible.com.
And right now, if you go to audibletrial.com slash scotthortonshow, you can get your first audio book for free.
Of course, I'm recommending Michael Swanson's book, The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military Industrial Complex and the Power Elite.
Maybe you've already bought The War State in paperback, but you just can't find the time to read it.
Well, now you can listen while you're out marching around.
Get the free audio book of The War State by Michael Swanson, produced by Listen and Think Audio at audibletrial.com slash scotthortonshow.