01/11/17 – Gilbert Doctorow on secretary of state nominee Tillerson, and Henry Kissinger’s influence on Trump’s foreign policy – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, now I'm very happy to welcome back to the show Gilbert Doctorow.
You can find his archive of a bunch of great articles at consortiumnews.com.
Bob Perry, he really does a good job of putting together a bunch of great writers to cover the news for you, I gotta say.
Gilbert is the European coordinator for the American Committee for East-West Accord, which is, of course, the most important project on the planet Earth.
And he's the author of the book, Does Russia Have a Future?
That's a pretty big question to ask as the title of a book.
Anyway, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gilbert?
Well, thanks very much for having me.
And it's a pleasure to be here for this decisive day, considering what's going on even as we speak.
The Tillerson confirmation hearing is going on.
And in any moment now, Donald Trump will be opening his awaited press conference.
All right.
Now, yeah, sorry to interrupt.
I hope you got your DVR set so you can watch it in a minute when we're done here.
I'm stacked up with interviews all morning long.
But yeah, I did see a little bit of the Rex Tillerson confirmation hearing.
Sounds like you did, too.
What did you make of his statement on Ukraine there?
Well, I would I'd like to just step back a minute.
Sure.
We're answering your question about Ukraine.
Yeah.
And put this in the broader context of where your invitation to speak today came in, because you have been requesting that I that I be prepared to comment on my last two articles in Consortium News.
One of them being about Henry Kissinger and Henry Kissinger.
And Henry Kissinger and that article are entirely front and center.
And what we heard about Tillerson and his responses to Senators Cardin and Corker.
And that means he was responding to two questions that were hostile in an environment that is neocon dominated.
And his answers showed to me that he had been prepared, coached by Henry Kissinger.
So now coming back precisely to your question about Ukraine, Tillerson said a number of things, which lend themselves to various levels of interpretation.
I can assure you that in tomorrow's New York Times and Washington Post, CNN and so forth, the sound bites will all be on one level, which is accurate.
That level was there.
And that is precisely what you are feeling for when you asked me what he said about Ukraine and behind Ukraine, Crimea, and the need to stand tough to the Russians, which the Obama administration couldn't do because it was under Barack himself.
It was as wimpish as you can imagine.
The point is that the responses by Tillerson were on several levels of interpretation and several different types of contradictory pointers were given out.
What you're going to see tomorrow in the mainstream media will call attention, as I say, to the sound bites that the neocons wanted to hear.
And his Ukraine statement fits directly into that.
The violation of international norms, we should have given the Russians military signals, not economic and trade signals, after they took Crimea.
At the same time, as I say, there were other indications which said, read my lips.
And these indications were his mention at the end that he's an engineer by training and that he follows the facts to where they lead him.
Everything about Ukraine and everything about most of U.S. foreign policy has been lies for most of the last 16 years.
And if Mr. Tillerson follows the facts, we'll have a very different foreign policy.
But he didn't say that.
Do you follow me?
Yeah, I mean, well, that's the whole thing, right?
In fact, there's even a clip going around on Twitter right now where he says, actually, I haven't even discussed Russia with Trump yet, which may be an outright lie.
I don't know.
I mean, I think both of us, Gilbert, we want very badly to be optimistic here that these guys know better than what's the D.C. consensus, which is this insane policy, right?
Senator Cardin heard what he wanted to hear, that Tillerson will uphold the law of the land, including the Magnitsky Act.
After all, Cardin is one of the co-authors of the Magnitsky Act.
What I found and what I find compelling about our present moment and at the start of what is an uncivil war in American governance is that you have a situation, as you had in about 1985, 1986 in Russia, where one Mikhail Gorbachev was intent on changing almost all the rules of how the Soviet Union was run.
But he had the luxury of being essentially an unquestioned ruler, a ruler questioned only by his immediate surroundings and not in public display.
He had the possibility of subverting the system from within and doing it in little baby steps so that no one around him was aware of what he was up to until it was too late.
In the case of the United States and Mr. Trump, we have an incoming president who is as subversive of the Washington consensus, of the neocon ideology that we heard on full display and full plumage from the leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, starting with Senator Corker and going through the still more explicit ideological pronouncements of Senator Cardin.
In the case of Trump, he has come on full blast, shooting all guns.
Mr. Tillerson is not an elected official, he's an appointed official, who requires the confirmation of the Senate.
He had no such option of coming out full guns.
Right, yeah, that's definitely true.
I mean, you know, the subtext here, as you say, which is so important and which ought to be astounding to people, really, is that when he's saying, well, we should have, you know, had the Ukrainian military march right up to the Russian border and arm them up to prevent the Russians coming in, even if he's just lying, that's what these Republican senators want to hear and they will not settle for less than, yes, I would have escalated a military confrontation with the Russians over the Donbass, for God's sake.
That's, I mean, the fact that even if he's lying, that's what he has to say to please them is just amazing.
No, I think that he wasn't lying.
What he was saying, again, this was a set of statements that have been very, very carefully prepared, and there's no question that this was choreographed and that he was subjected to mock interviews.
What he was saying was very, very weasel-like, but it was done with great graciousness and sophistication, so everybody could come away with what he wanted to hear.
I don't believe he was lying, and I think he firmly believed in what he said.
You said he would march up to the Russian border.
Let's put it another way.
They would march up to the Ukrainian border.
There are two ways of looking at it.
He was saying that if you want to stop a military or prevent, it wasn't stop, because his point was very explicit, that the change in ownership, the change in possession, rather, of the Ukraine took everyone by surprise.
Of Crimea.
Crimea took everyone by surprise.
And the next act should have been a deterrent act that would be a clear, unequivocal signal to the Russians that this is where it stops.
Instead, we had these little baby steps and little nibbling at their heels in these economic sanctions and pressuring our allies to join us and so on.
And he's saying that instead, if there had been a military response to a military reality, it would have been much more effective than economic sanctions.
That's what he was saying.
There was no lie there.
That's insane, though, right?
I mean, it sounds like he's really a lot worse than Obama.
He agrees with the Republican senator's consensus that… No, I don't agree with you.
He has made unequivocal statements that, if you take them to their conclusions, mean there'll be an overturning of the whole U.S. foreign policy.
But he didn't do it in a challenging way.
I told you one point that he made, that he is an engineer by training, meaning he's not an ideologist, and he will follow the facts where they lead him, which these gentlemen do not do.
They change the facts to suit their conclusions.
He also said that he reports to the president, not to them, and that he will implement the president's policy.
If you listened, it was right there out.
He also said that he will consult with them and looks forward to testifying before them.
So his statements were fully constitutional.
That is exactly what his position is.
He reports and he will work with the administration and his fellow members of the cabinet.
Those were all there, Scott.
So there's no point in his testimony that he lied.
At the same time, he said at the outset his opening remarks were accountability for everybody.
Now, that doesn't sound like it's saying much.
It sounds anodyne.
But the reality is we have had 16 years with no accountability of anybody.
If we had accountability, then Dennis Kucinich's motion in the Congress to impeach Cheney would have had resonance and the man would be in prison.
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We have had no accountability for 16 years.
So let's talk about Henry Kissinger here, speaking of no accountability.
A very interesting article.
I'm begging you people in the audience to read this thing, man.
Well, I just love it.
You know, there's so much that I learned reading this.
Trump and the revenge of the realists.
And I think probably many people in this audience know that he's been actually relatively good on Russia in the sense of saying, come on, come on.
Putin is not a dictator.
I mean, he sure is a long time serving elected president, but he is an elected president.
And, you know, no, the situation in Ukraine is not so cut and dry, as you say.
And these kinds of things.
But, you know, also, of course, going back to the 70s, of course, he was, you know, the Sino-Soviet split.
And then, you know, detente with both, really.
Russia and China and all that was part of his thing.
So as much blood as he has on his hands, he is a little bit, you know, more nuanced in his understanding of Russia's position in the world and especially their reactions to our policies that the rest of D.C. seem kind of blind to.
Is that right?
Is that what you think?
Well, Scott, the role of Kissinger right now is, as I say in the article, he is a personality who to certain people within the Republican Party and not just the Republican Party is the good housekeeping seal of approval.
He gives gravitas and intellectual authority.
I don't mean that he's right or that he knows what he's talking about.
That is something I dispute, I think, rather earnestly in my article.
As far as Russia concerns, Kissinger never studied the subject properly, never had any affinity for it, and he always liked Chinese food.
So what I mean to say is that if you read his book on China, you understand that he was always infatuated with China, whereas he had no personal rapport or interest in Russia, which for him was always a country that was not part of the European tradition and should never be part of NATO, for example, but part of the security architecture of Europe.
As I say in my article, Kissinger was one of the authors of policies that brought us to the confrontation we are today, going back to his very important and very negative remarks about Russia in testimony before Congress in 1994.
Kissinger is a colorful figure.
The man is a genius in terms of intellectual capacity.
Whether that says anything about his moral dimension, of course it doesn't.
And I can tell you that it isn't a new thing.
In 1994, when he published his masterful work called Diplomacy, I looked at the voice of the people, that is, comments in Amazon.com of readers of the book, and some of them came up with, Henry writes very well for a war criminal.
I was not the least bit surprised when, in response to my article, which appeared in various forms in a number of portals online, you have cited one version of it in Consortium News, and a fuller version was in Russia Insider.
There were, particularly in Russia Insider, which has a lot of very emotionally driven readers, many of whom never read the articles but use it as space for comments, there were a great many in that 1% who sent in comments who were saying the man is a war criminal and how can you...
Well, how can you?
Right now he's doing a very positive thing.
And I tell you with 100% certainty, Scott, that Kissinger's insights into how to handle the neocons were very much on display today in Tillerson's testimony.
What do I mean?
Henry Kissinger is a realist, but he has bent his realism to avoid being ostracized and to avoid being ignored totally by the political establishment, for whom realism is a dirty word.
And so he has progressively, from the 90s on, tailored his message to his readership to include heavy doses of values-driven policies, of universal values, of the projection of democracy in defense of human rights.
These moral objectives, he has worked into his story about how foreign policy should be built in a way that Tillerson reproduced today in the Senate hearings.
In other words, dressed up real politic with the moral language that these crusaders need to hear, but not so much changing the real policy.
The crusaders wouldn't be in the position of power they're in if they didn't have enormous resonance with the general public.
The general public does not like the language of realism.
It sounds cold, cutthroat, doesn't project any warmth that gives people a comfortable feeling.
They want to hear that we are defenders of freedom.
No matter how many people die and no matter how disastrous all these...
We're not the least bit interested in one million people, many of them civilians, having been murdered by U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq immediately after the 2003 invasion.
Hey, let me take you back here, Gilbert, to what you said about Kissinger in 1994.
You know, I don't care.
I'm not embarrassed to say when I was a kid, I was a one world government kind of John Birch conspiracy kook, even though I was never a right winger.
But I did agree with them.
I thought they were really trying to make a world federal government out of the UN and that NATO was the one world army.
And when they moved on NATO expansion, they had talked about bringing Russia into NATO.
And as you say here more clearly than I guess I understood that when they signed up Poland for NATO, that the understanding was then that, yeah, we're going to bring you in next Russia.
And this is what I thought was the greatest threat in the world, the one world army of the north at war against the new enemy in Islamic South Asia kind of a thing.
And yet and I would have thought that the Rockefellers and Henry Kissinger were absolutely the leaders in pushing this policy.
And they did have the NATO Russia Council for a little while and all this.
And then I read your article and I already know I was wrong about all this a long time ago.
I figured that out in 2002, I guess, with the Iraq war, the run up to the Iraq war.
But I should have figured out 99 when they bombed Serbia.
But anyway, the real point is that you're instructing me here in this article that it was Kissinger himself who threw all the cold water on the NATO Russia Council and this move for the merger of our military with theirs.
And instead said, no, the mission of NATO is the same as it ever was to him in and dominate Russia, not to cooperate with them.
Well, yes, that's precisely right.
The let's take this step by step.
He was against various parts of NATO expansion.
He was against expanding NATO.
This is not 1994.
This is before 2004.
He was stood against the expansion of NATO into the Baltic states.
So the position of Kissinger on NATO is unequivocal and unchanging in one respect.
From the early 1990s into the new millennium, his position was that NATO was a military alliance and it should be motivated in expanding by improving the security and capabilities of the collective group and not in watering them down or weakening those capabilities, which was going to happen in the case of expansion to the Baltics, which brought in obligations that were unsupportable.
And Kissinger understood that and also greatly threatened the vital interests of Russia, placing, creating challenges, security challenges, which weren't there before the expansion of NATO.
But going back to 1994, the critical point was 1993, actually, when Yeltsin went to Warsaw and gave his consent, quite unexpected, to the inclusion of Poland in the expanding NATO.
That was the first country from the former Warsaw bloc, which was being inducted or which proposed for induction into NATO.
And Yeltsin gave his consent with the very great expectation that the Russians would be named next as NATO members.
But I think you have to appreciate that the inclusion of Russia would have changed the nature of NATO.
And that is precisely what Kissinger called out when he testified before Congress in 1994 against Russian inclusion.
The point that he made is that Russia is that NATO is a military alliance, not a collective security talking shop.
And the alliance works because of American dominance.
If Russia were included, that dominance would no longer be there to be exercised in an unrestricted way.
He was quite correct in that.
But that has been the preservation of NATO in its original form, as you correctly summarized, as an association, an alliance to keep Russia in its place and keep Russia down.
This was inherent in NATO's organization, and it was what Henry was urging be continued.
And that recommendation has brought us to the dire straits we are in today in our relationship with Russia.
Well, now, so I don't guess you expect Trump and Tillerson to go ahead and reopen the Russian NATO Council and get all cozy with them like that, right?
Just hopefully back off the expansion and the continuing poking them in the eye with a stick?
Well, Scott, I think you're running ahead of the facts.
We'll have to watch this space.
But I insist that Tillerson's statement and his response to the initial questions that I listened to, because it was going on and going on, persuade me that he will be serving Donald Trump.
He will not be serving Senator Cardin and Senator Corker.
He said things that had to be said to shut them up.
And precisely on Ukraine, as you mentioned, precisely on the hotty horse of Cardin, the Magnitsky Act, and the primacy of protecting human rights, fighting corruption, etc., etc., that Cardin insists, as all the neocons and liberal interventionists who constitute the Washington consensus believe.
We had witnesses today to a very neat summary of an entire ideology of American empire.
And you had Tillerson facing that, being blasted by that and saying, what are you going to do about it?
And his response was muted.
His response, when pinned down on individual questions, like what should we have done after the Russians took Crimea, were in line with what his auditors, his interrogators, wanted to hear.
But that does not mean that he is going to do as you suggest and follow the dictates of Senator Cardin.
He reports to President Trump.
Well, yeah, but no, I'm asking the question from the other side, which is, you know, Trump keeps saying not just, hey, let's get along with Russia.
He says maybe we need to work with Russia to solve the problems of the world and this kind of thing.
Exactly what I don't want to hear either.
Well, the likelihood, likely policy that Trump will work through using Tillerson as his tool will be to step back from the deadly confrontation with Russia that we have today to define certain areas where we can cooperate.
And cooperate constructively to resolve major international challenges, starting with ISIS, but not only.
I do not see a lovey-dovey relationship with Russia developing.
It is not necessary.
It is not practical.
Our interests do not coincide in many areas.
Our national interests.
I don't mean our propagandistic, ideological, seeking to project democracy and the rest of it.
No, no.
Our national interests, economic interests, security interests, and so forth do not coincide.
We have a much poorer fit in trade relations and economic ties with Russia than Europe does because Europe has a major energy partnership with Russia.
We don't.
Not because of sanctions, but simply we are nearly self-sufficient in energy and Europe is severely deficient in energy.
So, the nature of our relationship with Russia is geopolitical and also we have a joint interest in non-proliferation of nuclear arms.
We have a number of very important issues, but the primary issue is not to engage in a nuclear war with one another.
That's what I'm saying.
Seems like it's an interesting time to understate it with the old cliche where a simple statement like that is sort of the radical perspective and the centrist adult moderate consensus in Washington, D.C. is this incredibly hawkish policy that is so dangerous to really the future of our entire species.
It's just, I don't know.
That's why I like talking with you, Gilbert, because you're doing the good work here.
This is the most important project.
I really mean that when I say it.
The Center for East and West Accord.
The point is to have a policy that's not suicidal.
And the policy that we have been developing for the last 16 years is suicidal.
It ignores the reality that Russia is our peer in destructive power.
I mean nuclear power.
And we have been taunting them.
We have been chest beating about our values and how they are run by a dictatorship and Lord knows what.
But we have been doing this to our own detriment, a potential detriment, because we have been doing a lot of chest beating, as I say.
And the Russians have been in a very defensive position.
They have felt cornered.
We have put bases all around them.
We have held military exercises all around them in this plumed display, which may go down very well with the Washington Post and the New York Times.
But it's putting the whole nation at risk of utter destruction.
All right, so that is Gilbert Doctorow.
I'm sorry, sir.
I got to go.
We got to go.
But thank you so much for your time again on the show.
I really do appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all.
That is Gilbert Doctorow.
It's EastWestAccord.com.
Wait, I have it right here.
EastWestAccord.com.
Make sure I get that right.
EastWestAccord.com.
And you can read all he writes at ConsortiumNews.com.
It's the American Committee for East-West Accord.
And we didn't get to talk about the Germany article.
Go read all of his stuff at ConsortiumNews.com, especially Trump and Revenge of the Realists.
ScottHorton.org, LibertarianInstitute.org, Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
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