03/10/17 – Zaid Jilani on Trump’s selection of Russia-hawk Richard Grennell for NATO ambassador – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Zaid Jilani from The Intercept.
Welcome back to the show, Zaid.
How are you doing?
Great.
Good.
All right.
Hey, you wrote this article.
I think it's really important.
It's called Trump Picks Hawkish Critic of Russia as NATO Ambassador Veering from One Extreme to the Other.
And yeah, Horton's law.
He can forget all the good promises and take all the bad ones to the bank.
So here we are.
The one thing that Trump was good on was trying to get along with Russia.
And now he's appointed another Russia hawk to his war council.
Now, this guy, Richard Grinnell is his name.
He is to be the ambassador to NATO.
Just how important of a position is that actually?
Yeah, well, I mean, I think a lot of people would tell you that it's not necessarily a huge policymaking position.
I mean, they are sort of dispatches or chief diplomats to the NATO alliance.
But on the other hand, I mean, they are folks who also have the State Department president's ears.
And I think that given his views on NATO, we'll be likely to see should this choice actually be officially announced.
I should note this has been reported in several outlets, although the president hasn't officially submitted his nomination.
But should he actually be announced, nominated, confirmed?
I think this would be a signal that the Trump administration is moving a little bit to the right on this issue and maybe is a little bit receptive to some of the criticism that it's received vis-a-vis Russia.
And now, do you know much about the current Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, this Schiaparetti, Schiaparetti?
You know, I don't actually, I gotta be honest, I haven't followed him necessarily.
Me either.
I don't know the first thing, but I need to know.
No, I really don't.
But I will say that, you know, we had a pretty decent article related to Breedlove, who was formerly sort of, I think he was the Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Europe.
And, you know, I would definitely suggest that your listeners go and read our Intercept article about him, because that was actually sort of in the first batch of hacks were some emails that he was sending.
And I think what we saw with him anyway was that NATO, you know, as his position in NATO, he sort of felt that Obama was sort of, you know, gun shy, that he didn't want to do enough with respect to sending lethal aid to Ukraine.
He was sort of letting Russia walk all over Crimea, so on and so forth.
And that's sort of the school of thought that I think Grinnell is coming from.
And Grinnell served as a foreign policy advisor and spokesperson to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.
And I think a lot of your listeners might also remember that, you know, that was sort of a flare up between Romney and Obama as well during the debates, is that, you know, Romney was asked about the biggest threat, geopolitical threat.
He replied Russia, Obama sort of clowned him and said, hey, you know, we're not in the 1980s anymore.
You know, that doesn't make any sense.
This is the guy that was telling Romney to say that.
Right.
Well, you know, it's a matter of Grinnell.
You know, Grinnell, actually, he also is sort of an openly gay conservative.
He's a political consultant.
He worked for the Bush administration.
He's openly gay.
And, you know, Romney actually fielded a lot of complaints about sort of having that sort of person as a top spokesperson.
So actually he left the campaign at some point over that sort of issue.
But as far as I can tell, it had nothing to do with policy advice that he was giving or, you know, his worldview on issues like this.
I think in terms of this, they were fairly well synced together.
Yeah, sounds like it.
Well, I know a Republican from the Bay Area and there's very few of them and they all know each other.
My buddy says that this guy's a total nut on whatever the issue is.
Not necessarily, oh, I disagree with his policies, but the guy's a basket case.
Well, just like Trump, he has a very prolific social media presence.
He has a lot of tweets over the years talking about a lot of issues.
And, you know, the more you look at him, the more he looks like a, you know, he could fit right in with what you would see on foreign policy or any policy from like, let's say, the Heritage Foundation or AEI or any number of these outfits.
I mean, I don't think he's, you know, he is not in any way descending from what the foreign policy establishment would be saying.
And in many ways, I think he just, you know, he spends a lot of time, as a lot of the Republicans did, complaining that Obama wasn't hawkish enough, saying Obama was, you know, too soft on Iran, too soft on Russia.
Yeah, and you know what, this ain't just, hey, what are we going to do with Medicare?
This is everything.
If we're going to send in, you know, we already have trainers there.
We're already sending in trucks and supplies and equipment of all kinds.
But if we start really arming up the Ukrainian military, which they then obviously could and probably would use to escalate the war against the secessionists or at least autonomists in the east there, that could lead to a huge escalation of a conflict that, after all, it's at a kind of low boil again now.
But we have a peace deal that is, you know, more or less supposed to be in place here, this Minsk II thing.
We don't want to arm up anybody and change the balance of things now when we have more or less an acceptable status quo on all sides.
What the hell?
I mean, maybe this guy, I'm not saying I would have ever agreed with him in a million years, but I'm just saying, at least from his own point of view, maybe he had a point two years ago.
But he doesn't have a point now when we have Minsk II.
I mean, right?
Well, I mean, it's funny.
He has been advocating for this since 2014, which is when a lot of this started.
But even now, I mean, you can look at his social media, his Twitter.
He's still talking about, hey, we need to be for lethal arms to Ukraine, which is the same thing that John McCain is saying, same thing a number of people in Congress have been saying.
Congress actually passed money authorizing lethal arms to Ukraine, but Obama just never took it up.
He never utilized it.
And it's sort of on Trump's desk to do.
I mean, I would have to, you know, I'm not entirely sure of this, but I think that Trump could unilaterally do that because Congress already passed the authorization to do that.
If not, they could just do it again.
Right, and then the restriction that had been passed that said, yeah, but you can't use any of this money or authorization to arm or train, or never mind arm, but to train Nazis, they repealed that.
Actually, first they passed it, and then they got rid of the thing that says not if they're Nazis.
Right, I think that was an amendment.
I think that was a John Conyers amendment.
Yeah, it was.
I think it was John Conyers.
Right, right, and I think in conference or something they took it out because basically there are some units in Ukraine that are basically neo-Nazis, and they're fighting on sort of the anti-secessionist side, you know, the side of the opposite that Russia is on.
And, you know, Grinnell is somebody who also, this is interesting, Grinnell, you know, I think when this started in 2014, he also criticized Obama for saying that he would take war off the table.
He said that, you know, even if we don't actually want to go to war, we shouldn't be saying that, right?
You know, we should at least rhetorically be threatening an actual U.S. military response to what's happening in Ukraine, meaning deploying our own forces, right, you know, not just arming the Ukrainians.
So, like, honestly, you know, that's what's really interesting about this, that this guy really is someone who's ready to get, you know, into the thick of things here in a military way, which is very, very different from Trump saying I want to get along with Russia, you know, I think NATO has made these mistakes, you know, it needs to be changed.
This is a guy who's very much, you know, on the right-wing edge of this issue, which is honestly the complete opposite of what a lot of the criticism of Trump, especially from Democrats, has been.
You know, they all keep claiming he's Putin's puppet, he's in bed with Russia, so on and so forth.
And it's definitely true that Trump has said some things rhetorically friendlier to Russia than many of his Republican colleagues.
But in terms of the actual policy and the staffing that he's doing, it really doesn't seem that he's all that friendly with Russia.
And you have to remember something about Trump.
Trump is, you know, quintessentially a negotiator, right?
So even when he makes statements or says one thing or another, in his mind it might just be a matter of negotiation, it might be a matter of him setting up pieces on a sort of a chess table.
And part of what he's done, I think, throughout his life and his business career is he's very good at screwing over people he was once friendly with, right?
So he might just decide season two of the White House has to be about, you know, getting tough on Russia.
You know, everyone wants him to be tough on Russia, so it's time to get tough on Russia.
So, you know, I think that's a real concern.
And people should be looking at the policy, not just, you know, every time a news story comes out saying, well, somebody on Trump's team talked with, you know, someone in the Russian government, which, you know, is kind of their jobs as government officials and they're supposed to be talking to people all over the world.
I mean, I think they need to pay attention to the details and the substance of the policy because that's very important going forward.
And, you know, particularly this western border of Russia and what's happening in Ukraine, I mean, that's one of the zones in the world where you could even see a nuclear war or something if things got out of hand.
So I think people need to be very careful about that and not just go to the administration, you know, like McCain has been doing or some of the Democrats have been doing and then trying to take a tougher line when, honestly, that could end up being very bad for our country, for Russia, for Ukrainians as well.
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Well, and the thing is, too, is, you know, there was this thing Tanker told Greg Sargent at The Washington Post that, yeah, you know, this is a great way to hem in Trump.
It's not like we're going to be able to stop him from taking office.
You know, this was back then.
It's not like we're going to be able to get the Electoral College to, you know, overthrow the results of the election or any of this.
But at least we'll be able to hem in Trump on his choices when it comes to dealing with Russia.
And, you know, and the great fear that he would try to make some kind of durable peace.
And they don't want that.
They prefer conflict.
But the thing is, you know, with all this piling on and, you know, the chorus of basically the entire left half of the political establishment and the media, you know, with this whole Manchurian candidate, you know, Siberian candidate thing about Trump all the time is that I think you say this in the article.
They might provoke him not just because, you know, season two of the White House, but they might make him really feel like, damn, I'm completely buried in Russia accusations here.
I can't move on anything.
And so I better do something to prove that that's just not true.
How do I show you people that I'm not the puppet of Putin?
How about I shoot down a Russian jet over the Black Sea?
Well, this also ties into something that Glenn wrote, I believe, a week back, when Trump had his address to Congress.
It's not a State of the Union because it's the first year.
When he had his joint address to Congress, though, he specifically carved out a section to talk about what he did in Yemen with his raid.
He got thunderous applause for that, for sort of offering condolences to the widow of the Navy SEAL who died during that raid.
He got very positive media reviews for that.
I mean, sort of the lesson that Trump has been learning is that, you know, war, or at least appearing very tough or belligerent, can look good for him.
I mean, it certainly looked good for George Bush, right?
I mean, after 9-11, which was this huge sort of security disaster, really, I mean, it shouldn't have brought his approval rating up.
After 9-11, Bush's approval rating went to 90 percent.
Before that, he was considered a very sort of feckless and ineffective president.
But after that spike, I think a lot of, not only U.S. presidents, but leaders across the world, you know, they do feel like they're taught a lesson by politics and by the media that, hey, when you're at war and when you're appearing tough, when you're escalating things with other countries, when you're invoking nationalism, that can be good for your political approval ratings, that can be good for your political power.
So if that lesson is being taught to Trump right now, I think that could end up being very dangerous.
And I think that's why a lot of the people who are going after him related to this issue should try to be somewhat measured in what they say and what they ask him to do.
Yeah.
And, you know, look, nobody has to spin anything nice about Vladimir Putin to just admit the truth, concede the truth that he's not an expansionist.
Maybe he's really bad for the people of Russia or whatever, but he's not the head of an expansionist power right now.
And there's no legitimate reason to believe that he'd like to conquer any of his neighboring states or disrupt the international order of any of these things.
At the eve of the Ukrainian coup in February 2014, he was busy metaphysically kissing the West's entire ass, hosting the Sochi Olympics and trying to say, see, I'm one of you.
We're like you.
We're a modern white Christian European society like you.
We're like you.
And we're in the middle of telling them, hell no, kicking them in the face and telling them they're not welcome to be friends with us.
You know, the whole thing is nuts.
And, you know, I wouldn't say I'm an expert on Russia or anything like that.
But from what I can see, I think people need to be able to separate out a couple of things.
You know, one, when Trump sort of defends Putin's personal character or whatever, yes, that's a little bit strange and unusual for a U.S. president.
But, I mean, he also does that with other leaders.
He does that with the leader of the Philippines.
He does that with Netanyahu.
He does that with other folks.
And we should be able to separate out whatever someone thinks about Putin's personal character and what policy from the United States towards Russia should be.
Because a lot of, you know, a lot of the policy between the U.S. and Russia should be around interests that, one, both countries share.
And, two, we should understand that, hey, there are certain things we can do that would make people in Russia more apprehensive and more likely to engage in military action and less.
For example, with Ukraine, you know, imagine if there was a gigantic military alliance from a power that's traditionally adversarial to us on our southern border, right?
We would feel very apprehensive.
Maybe we would be provoked into taking some kind of military action.
Certainly after 9-11 we took a lot of military action, you know, when we were very fearful.
I mean, that's kind of how Russia views NATO on its western border.
You know, they spent hundreds of years getting invaded from that border.
They see this NATO alliance that wasn't supposed to really last past the Cold War, but it kept growing.
NATO even invited Ukraine to join.
Grinnell, who, by the way, really wants Ukraine into NATO, that's one of his big things he advocates for.
You know, Russia in that situation, people in Russia who think, hey, we need to do something like we need to have a military excursion into this place, Crimea.
We need to do this annexation.
People like that, you know, that thinking only gets empowered by the fact that we disregard their legitimate security interests, which is that they do feel like this is a threat to their border when we see this NATO expansion.
And I think even some people in the United States who are nothing like doves, like Colin Powell, have said things to this extent, have said that if the West and NATO are expanding troops in different places, Russia's going to respond.
And I think having that rational calculation about Russia is not to excuse anything they do, not to say they don't commit human rights abuses, not to say so on and so forth.
It's just understanding that different countries have different interests and that if we want a peaceful world, we have to have kind of a calm, sober analysis of those interests and come to understand that certain things that we would do could be provocative and could create a worse situation.
And I think honestly with Russia that's not happening right now.
I think in Congress every day people are just saying we've got to get tougher and tougher on Russia, even when, you know, honestly that's not necessarily the right policy.
I mean, if we had just said that we need to do the opposite of whatever Russia wants, then we would have invaded Iraq, which we did, right?
Because Putin at the time in 2003 was saying, hey, it's a bad idea, right?
So, you know, I just think that...
Well, look, we can't ignore that the Russians, you know, they saved Obama after he talked himself into a corner and, you know, under pressure from the Israel lobby and his own Secretary of State almost went to war against Syria, against the government in Damascus in 2013, not to discount the CIA effort, but this is a whole other level of intervention on al-Qaeda's side that didn't happen because Putin intervened and worked a deal where they'll export all their chemical weapons, get rid of every last bit of it, and then on the condition that you don't attack them.
And then, of course, he also put pressure on the Ayatollah, not that it was all because of Putin or anything like that, but he put the pressure on the Ayatollah that, hey, you know, I would really like it if you would sign this deal when it came to the big nuclear deal, which is served to, you know, should have ratcheted down the doomsday clock by at least a minute and a half or two.
I mean, that was a pretty damn good deal.
I don't care what anybody says about it.
And we have to remember there were also that in the first term of the Obama administration, they spent a lot of time negotiating a, you know, nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia that was very important for both countries, a huge success for both countries.
But in this climate, you would never see that happen because people would say, if we agree to anything that Russia wants, hey, we're appeasing, this is a sign that it's a big conspiracy, so on and so forth, because we lost our ability to rationally, you know, discuss what, you know, what we want, what we don't want with respect to relations with Russia.
It's just about being more standoffish, more adversarial, which isn't often the best way to go.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so this guy, Grinnell, you said it's not really official, but they're leaking, basically, that he's to be this choice here.
Is that really symbolic, do you think?
I mean, to get ahead of ourselves a little bit, admittedly.
Does this mean that Trump is, you think, really giving in?
I mean, as you said, if this guy is really, we've got to arm the Ukrainians, we've got to bring them into NATO and this kind of thing.
Personnel is policy.
Trump's got to understand that, that if he just, you know, fills his ranks with nothing but McMasters and people who agree with him, then he's going to end up with a bad policy.
In other words, is he giving in already at this point, throwing his hands up and saying, well, fine, I guess you guys get your Cold War after all, if you want it so bad.
I don't know.
That's kind of how it looks to me.
I mean, it's very difficult to say.
I mean, if we, you know, like you said, we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves because right now we're less than two months into his presidency and a lot of stuff's up in the air.
I mean, I think a lot of the foreign policy positions in the government are not even staffed with the State Department and so on and so forth.
So I think it's very difficult to say what he actually does with respect to these things.
But I do think that in many ways, Trump has not necessarily rocked the boat as much as people thought, not just in foreign policy, but in domestic policy.
I think a lot of ways he's an alias to George Bush.
I don't think he has the really harsh neocons and Cheney type people around him like Bush did.
But I think that in terms of domestic and in some foreign policies, he's brought in a lot of traditional conservative Republicans who think like conservative Republicans.
And I think that is going to have an impact.
I do think personnel's policy, even if Trump was highly particular and highly concerned about the day-to-day direction of policy, which I'm not sure that he is, but even if he was, there's no way he could manage all the policy the federal government's doing all over the world.
No president can.
So I think the personnel are very important.
And with respect to who are the people he's hiring, I do think most of them tend to have fairly traditional Republican views on issues like what's happening in Eastern Europe, what's happening in Russia, what's happening in Syria.
I don't know how much Trump himself, plus some of the more iconoclastic people around him, like let's say, for example, Bannon or his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, some of the people who aren't necessarily career conservative Republican people, how much they'll impact that.
But honestly, I don't really want to make any predictions because I do find it fairly unpredictable.
Yeah, it is.
It's pretty out of control.
All right, well, listen, thanks for writing the great article and thanks for coming on the show to talk about it.
Appreciate it.
It was great, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's Zaid Jilani.
He's at The Intercept.
This one is called Trump Picks Hawkish Critic of Russia as NATO Ambassador, veering from one extreme to the other.
Good God.
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