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All right, introducing Robert David English.
Robert is Associate Professor of International Relations, Slavic Languages and Literature, and Environmental Studies at USC.
That's a lot of things to teach.
And here he wrote this extremely important article about 20 days ago now, but I only just finished reading it.
It'll be the spotlight on antiwar.com tomorrow.
Russia, Trump, and a New Detente, Fixing U.S.-Russian Relations in Foreign Affairs.
They're the journal, of course, of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
How are you doing, sir?
Scott, I'm glad to be here.
Thanks for inviting me this morning.
Thanks very much.
I appreciate it.
Great article.
Very important stuff.
I really appreciate the historical review, and I sure hope the regular readership of foreign affairs enjoyed the trip down memory lane here.
You say at the beginning that in Washington, D.C., it's pretty much taken for granted that, I forget if you cite Vietnam or what, but you certainly cite the coup in Iran, that there's kind of a general—in 1953— there's kind of a general recognition among the Washington, D.C., foreign policy establishment that, yeah, we probably really shouldn't have done that.
And yet you say that when it comes to America's relationship with Russia in the 1990s, just after the end of the Cold War, and particularly under Bill Clinton from 1993 through 2001 there, that America's relationship with Russia is actually sort of the subject of a lot of mythology in D.C.
They don't really—they really, you thought, needed to be reminded of some of the reality of what America's relationship was with Russia during the Yeltsin years.
You're right.
And we can speculate about why Russia is different.
There's a lot of reasons Russia is different.
But no doubt when you ask informed Americans about Pinochet and the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile and the lasting bad effects from that, yeah, the coup in Iran, other interventions in Latin America, Central America, most reasonable Americans would say, yeah, we shouldn't have done that.
And what's more, we understand that it poisoned relations with those countries for a long time.
It doesn't—even to this day it affects our relations with Iran.
When it comes to Russia, what we did was something very similar in the 90s.
It was more recent.
And yet it's a blank spot in our memories.
We don't acknowledge it.
We don't even seem aware of it.
And yet it does poison our relations with Russia today.
Look, nobody who's sane would disagree that you need to understand how other people view you.
You have to get in their shoes or see yourself through their eyes occasionally if you're going to conduct diplomacy and get on in the world.
Even if you don't agree with the Russian viewpoint, you at least need to understand it.
And our meddling in their politics in the 90s, repeated meddling in electoral influence, is a big part of their perception of us today.
When we complain about the hacking and the release of Hillary's emails, the DNC stuff, it's no surprise that a lot of Russians roll their eyes and say, now you've got religion?
Talk about a double standard.
So, yes, that's a starting point for my piece is just reminding readers and reminding the Washington establishment that we're not so pure.
Yeah, you know, I guess part of it is just, you know, the Bill Clinton years.
If you ask the average American, they didn't know anything about the blockade and the bombing of Iraq or anything like that.
People think of the Clinton years as just the Simpsons and Seinfeld and peacetime.
And the, you know, especially in contrast to the George W. Bush years that came after, it just seems like sunshine and morning in America and this and that.
And if America was helping Boris Yeltsin, then that's good, right?
He was the great Democrat who helped to overthrow the communists.
So many things about Russia have to be viewed in context.
We have so many black and white, very simplistic impressions that are just the distort more than they clarify.
And that term democracy in Russia or, you know, golden age of democracy under Yeltsin is a prime example.
Yeah, they had more elections.
They had a freer press.
But it just loosed, it just unleashed a bacchanalia of corruption.
Of course, these oligarchs who hijacked state property and became instant billionaires are one example.
The corruption that proliferated all the way up and down official ranks is another.
And it basically impoverished most of the population.
The shock therapy economic policies, rapid privatization slash the size of the state that we pushed on Russia and the IMF pushed on them backfired badly.
And, you know, overall, if we look back on the 90s and say Yeltsin was good, they had democracy.
Then Russians roll their eyes and say, are you out of your mind?
We had democracy on paper, but we had gangsters and nepotism and oligarchs and chaos in reality.
And, of course, very low living standards, tragically low living standards.
If we continue to idealize the 90s and then believe that Putin came along and messed it up, we fundamentally misunderstand how Russians remember the 90s and how Russians look at Putin today.
Well, now, I guess there's two questions here.
The reality of the American role, you mentioned the IMF there, but what's the reality?
If you can elaborate a little bit more about what was I guess it's been going around lately on Twitter and stuff, the cover of Time magazine from 1996 about Clinton's guys helping Yeltsin win.
I guess there's even a documentary about it.
Yes.
But and then also then the second question related is the Russian perception of America's role in all of that, kicking them while they're down instead of being a good sport after the end of the Cold War.
On the narrow question of electoral influence and meddling in their politics, there were several junctures, 92, 93, when they had sort of internal almost the Civil War, when Boris Yeltsin rammed through with a falsified referendum, a new constitution with our backing.
And then a few years later, in 96, when he was threatened with he was going to be ousted, his popularity was below 10 percent.
And thanks to American money, thanks to American advisers, thanks to our diplomatic and all kinds of political support, he managed to pull off.
And also, again, ballot box stuffing and other chicanery.
He managed to pull off a miracle and get reelected.
We basically helped engineer that reelection.
It was very negative for Russia.
It was negative because four more years of Yeltsin was a disaster.
It was also negative because it corrupted their democracy.
It was illegitimate.
Their entire system with the new constitution and, of course, the person who, you know, then assumed four more years of the presidency.
When you compare what they did in this last election, it's not to say two wrongs make a right.
They don't.
But the scope of our interference, our scope of our meddling was even greater.
Those are the concrete examples.
And that Time magazine cover kind of celebrates, right?
We were celebrating at that time how we had helped Yeltsin win reelection by sending these commando teams of campaign advisers who were also, by the way, experts on dirty tricks.
Not just the good kind of campaigning, but the negative kind.
It's nothing to be proud of.
And yet the very fact that it happened and the very fact that we at that time were crowing about it tells you something about how wrong we got Russia.
And before you get to the economic part, just as far as the electoral interference there in 1996, wouldn't the excuse have been that?
Well, but the Reds were going to win.
We had to stop them or something like that.
OK, I'll give you two rebuttals to that or two points in response.
One is that that was greatly exaggerated.
Yeah, the Reds might have come back.
But you know what?
Ex-communists or socialists did the same thing in Poland, in Hungary, in other countries.
And the world didn't end.
They were basically left of center parties.
They wanted to slow down shock therapy.
They wanted to provide more support for veterans and the poor who were really suffering under this harsh shock therapy.
But the world didn't end in Poland or Hungary or elsewhere.
And it would not have ended in Russia.
You don't undermine democracy and hijack an election and corrupt the system.
And the Soviet Union was already gone.
So that part didn't matter anymore.
It had been gone.
Yeah.
We don't know exactly what would have happened if we had allowed the elections to go forward fairly, if the communists had won.
But they wouldn't have been the communists of all.
That's ridiculous.
The second thing I would say in response to that argument, that it was OK to interfere because the communists were on the way back.
You know, here's a wonderful irony.
So that's President Bill Clinton's time when we intervened to block a communist candidate from being elected president.
He was far more popular than Yeltsin.
We helped engineer Yeltsin's, you know, comeback and undermine the popularity of the communist candidate.
Now fast forward to 2011-2012 when Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton's wife, is secretary of state.
And Russia holds parliamentary elections now under Putin.
And there's chicanery.
There's ballot box stuffing.
And we speak out loudly.
And Hillary Clinton says there's been fraud and corruption.
She demands an investigation.
Do you know which party came in second in those elections?
Hillary Clinton's party, United Russia, won the elections with some help of some cheating, no doubt.
Do you know which party was in second place?
The communists.
So what irony.
In the 90s we are doing all we can to help, you know, tilt the elections in an illegal fashion to keep the communists out of power.
But now, under another Clinton, we are in favor of helping the communists who, again, were the victims of this chicanery or cheating.
The ironies just never stop.
Right.
And especially when they're up against the hand-picked successor of their boy Yeltsin.
Exactly.
And maybe this is the most tragic thing.
And again, another irony but a tragic one.
For all of his repressive and anti-democratic moves, Putin has engineered this sort of growing authoritarian state and dominance of the political system by legal means.
Right.
He's done it with the powers that the Constitution grants him.
He's got majorities in parliament.
They have voted and passed amendments that expand his powers, that reduce the powers of the governors of the regions and have created a far more centralized state.
Putin was able to do that thanks to the existing Russian constitution.
Who gave them that constitution?
That is the very same constitution that we supported when Yeltsin rammed it through in a – and it was a falsified referendum.
They didn't get a sufficient turnout.
We know that now.
But we closed our eyes.
We hailed it.
We helped create and pass the same constitution with illegal means that Putin has since used legally to expand his powers.
Boy, did we make a mistake in supporting the rule of one man, Yeltsin, over the rule of law.
Right.
Again and again, constitutional scholars, the lessons of history say do not bend the political system or bend the rules to serve your interests in the moment, to serve one candidate today.
Because it's going to come back to haunt you later.
And here it has in the case of Russia.
All right.
Now, could you please, before we move on to Putin years, and I'm sorry to dwell too long on the 90s, but I'm really very interested in the image and the reality of America's role in the enriching of these oligarchs at the expense of the entire population of the Russian Federation.
Because, you know, I guess there's no end to the stories of the criminality.
But why is it Bill Clinton's fault?
You mentioned the IMF there.
How much of that was American intervention aiding and abetting these oligarchs in there?
Yeah, there's direct and indirect.
Directly, of course, we are the leading capitalist power, the leading industrial power in the world.
We have the strongest voice in the World Bank and the IMF.
Therefore, the policies of those institutions that were pushed on Russia, the rapid privatization, the slashing the role of the state, the policies that backfired so badly, we are among the chief authors and supporters of.
So we bear the main responsibility.
If they were mistaken policies, and they were, and many top IMF and World Bank officials have since acknowledged that, then it's on us.
We pushed them on a Russia that was too weak and too broke to say no.
They were forced to go along.
That's the first thing I'd say.
The second is, of course, you can't blame Americans or Bill Clinton's administration for all and every instance of corruption and malfeasance in Russia.
Russians did those things, although we helped create the climate.
But what you can blame the Clinton administration for is turning a blind eye because already by the mid-90s, reports were pouring in that Russia was sinking into corruption, that the new laws were being broken, that members of Yeltsin's elite, his own family, were pigging out at the trough.
They were feeding off state funds, that it was just a cancer that was growing.
And Clinton didn't want to hear it.
There was a famous episode where actually Vice President Al Gore was in charge of a commission with the Russian prime minister.
And our intelligence began warning, hey, we've got a problem.
This regime that we're tying ourselves to is more and more deeply mired in corruption.
And intelligence officials were warning our government that this would be dangerous.
It was going to backfire in Russian public opinion.
The Clintons didn't want to hear that.
There was a famous episode where Gore took one of these reports and he scrawled an obscenity on it and threw it back at the authors.
I don't want to read this.
They didn't want to hear anything that would upset the policy they'd chosen.
They didn't want to hear that they had got in bed with a deeply corrupt regime.
So that's not direct blame, but it's indirect.
Because if we believe in democracy, honesty, openness and transparency, and we aren't guilty of double standards left and right, then at that point we should have spoken up.
Instead, we just held our nose and kept pumping money and diplomatic support into the disaster of the Yeltsin regime, especially in the mid to late 90s.
All right.
So then New Year's Eve 99, New Year's Day 2000, right around midnight Eastern time, I guess, Putin becomes the designated president.
And he's been more or less president ever since then.
That's right.
And now I get the idea.
I'm already familiar kind of with what you're up against, but I can tell your motivation and what you wrote here that you're really trying to explain the context because nobody wants to look at any context.
They're always truncating the antecedents, as Robert Higgs says.
And so you look at Vladimir Putin.
He looks like a mean old SOB who gets business done at any cost.
And we wouldn't want to cross him.
And whatever worst case scenario must be true.
First of all, Your Honor, just look at him.
You know, you can tell that he is up to no good and that we must contain him.
In fact, you and the article saying that this is the consensus in D.C. by and large is that Russia must be contained.
But you're saying you're kind of challenging that whole premise and narrative.
Well, yes.
First of all, let's just talk about Putin.
And it's appropriate to focus on Putin, at least at the outset.
Russian culture, Russian public opinion matters, too.
But Putin is the supreme leader and he's very powerful.
So let's look at him.
The caricature of him in Washington is that he's just a thug.
That he is deeply entrenched in sort of a KGB outlook because he was a KGB agent.
And therefore everything that's happened under him was preordained.
It's his fault and nobody else's.
And he's simply a bad actor, a thug, a gangster.
Well, not so fast.
Because that requires, if you're going to argue that, completely jumping over a different Putin.
When Putin came to power after Yeltsin's early resignation, as you say, late 99, New Year's Day 2000, Putin started out as a fairly pro-Western and liberal leader.
He rammed through some economic reforms that actually had him, you know, praised as man of the year by Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine.
He actually pushed through a flat tax, land reform, bankruptcy reform, a whole slew of liberal, neoliberal economic measures that we applauded.
Furthermore, he extended a kind of an olive branch to the West and shortly thereafter, of course, we were struck on 9-11.
And he was the first to offer condolences, to offer assistance in fighting the Taliban.
You couldn't have asked, especially coming out of the chaos of the 90s in Russia, when so many Russians were furious in America, we couldn't have asked for any leader to be more cooperative or pro-Western.
What did we do?
The Bush administration said, you know, thank you very much.
We'll take your help fighting the Taliban.
But by the way, we're canceling the ABM Treaty.
We're pulling out of that.
I'm going to build all these new missile defense installations around your borders.
We are going to slap all kinds of tariffs on your steel imports just because we want to pander to West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania in the midterms.
We are going to expand NATO again, this time right up to your borders.
A whole slew of actions leading up, of course, to the worst of all, which was the invasion of Iraq.
So I kind of summarize that as Putin greeted Bush with an open hand and he was answered with a clenched fist.
That may be a little hyperbolic, but it captures something essential.
The Putin, the early Putin in those early 2000s made a strong effort to be friends with the West, improve integration with the West economically and politically.
And he was met with this sort of rogue regime in George W. Bush.
And, yeah, Putin changed course then.
He became a more authoritarian, a more anti-Western leader.
But who wouldn't in his shoes?
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All right.
Now, I'm sorry that I skipped over the Kosovo war and NATO expansion in the 90s there.
But luckily we can get back to that when we talk about Obama years here in a minute.
But I want to stop on the question of whether Putin is a gangster himself, because I know a Russian who says, oh, yeah, he went in there and he got rid of the gangsters.
All right.
And then he put his own gangsters in there.
And he's nothing but, you know, you mentioned Yeltsin's kind of cronyism with his family and that kind of thing.
Yeltsin's his own crony, does nothing but fill his own bank account all day long.
And that's all he really cares about, this kind of thing.
What do you say to that?
Russia is a very corrupt country.
It was under Yeltsin.
It is under Putin.
How do I how can I put this?
There are multiple levels here.
One is this that it's always been corrupt.
There's a certain level of official corruption, of personal corruption that goes with the centuries of political culture.
The second, of course, is that since the end of communism, the opportunities with privatizing the economy and the kind of sleazy relations between government and business have multiplied.
And they were probably somewhat worse under Yeltsin.
As bad as that sounds now, they were worse under Yeltsin.
But they're not that good today.
It's not a good situation.
Part of it is also explained by Putin's need to just keep the elite around him loyal and in a very unstable political system.
He cultivates allies in the business community, in the military security sector, partly by paying them off or letting them enrich themselves.
Russia needs reform and more strident anti-corruption measures.
There's no doubt.
I won't defend Putin for a minute as someone who isn't corrupt.
I'm just putting it in the context that the guy before him was even more corrupt.
And they're fighting, you know, just centuries of history as well as catching up for the – all the mistakes made in the 90s.
I mean let me – I'm sorry to belabor this, but let me give you one more example.
Some of the oil companies that were basically given to oligarchs under Yeltsin, right?
Those companies became sources of enormous personal enrichment on the part of those oligarchs under Yeltsin.
When Putin came to power, he essentially insisted of those oligarchs, you either pay your taxes, which most of them weren't, and you either reinvest in your companies for the good of Russia, which many of them weren't, or we're going to take them away.
Enough buying soccer teams in England.
Enough buying up your 30th or 40th villa in Spain or France.
And enough avoiding any payment of federal taxes.
So when Putin came in, yes, he switched.
He replaced some of the old oligarchs with his own oligarchs.
But these – his own oligarchs in a sense are more loyal to the country than themselves.
They now pay their taxes and the Russian state budget is much more healthy and there's much less wasteful extravagant living and much more reinvestment in their companies.
So I hate to be defending Putin's oligarchs, but many of them are a lot better than Yeltsin's were.
It's all got to be taken in context.
It's all relative.
Well, and in the article you kind of rattle off some statistics here about how now instead of their population disappearing, it's one of the fastest growing populations in Europe.
You say that, in fact, in the context of debunking a whole list of accusations or dismissals really by Barack Obama about what a crappy country Russia is, just a military and a gas station, I think John McCain called it one time.
And you say that's really just not true, guys.
They're actually living back in the 90s in the reality they created and like to deny the rest of the time.
Again, because we like to simplify things, because anti-Russian sentiments never went away after the Cold War and they came back very strongly, this Russophobia, because we just find it easier to fixate on one bad guy than see things in their full complexity.
We therefore – yeah, we have this caricature of Putin as just, as you say, a corrupt guy running a gas station.
Putin came in following Yeltsin and as I said, none of the oligarchs were paying taxes.
The whole state system was breaking down.
People weren't being paid their pensions or salaries.
It was abysmal in the late 90s and of course the country had just went through another complete financial collapse in default.
Under Putin, yes, they of course have benefited from oil sales, high petroleum, oil and gas prices.
But Putin also reintroduced some law and order.
Now people pay their taxes.
Now those funds go into rebuilding roads and bridges and trains, improving infrastructure, reviving education, reviving scientific research.
If you deny all that, then you just look like an idiot and especially in the eyes of Russians.
I defy anyone who ever traveled or lived in Russia back in the old days, the 70s or 80s, to take a trip now.
Let's say from St. Petersburg to Moscow or anywhere in the hinterland.
You will be amazed at the improved condition of roads, the new railroads, infrastructure, communications.
They've got a long way to go, no doubt.
It won't impress you if you're coming from Paris or London.
But it's a lot better than it was under the 90s because Putin insisted on reinvestment in the country.
And now people, you know, they have better public transportation, better services and they appreciate it.
If you're just going to demonize Putin and deny him any credit for what he's achieved, then you will never understand why a lot of ordinary Russians respect him.
He's not a good guy and there is corruption, but he's a lot better guy and a lot less corrupt than what went before.
All right.
Now, I had missed all this in 1996, but when they started the expansion of NATO, there are a lot of people with very hawkish names who spoke out against it.
I was amazed just recently reading Jerry Brown's review.
Who knew?
Jerry Brown's review of William Perry's book about nuclear weapons.
And he talks about how in 1996, you had Robert McNamara and Paul Nitze and a lot of the greatest hawks of the Cold War said don't expand NATO.
And they were dead serious about it.
And including Bill Clinton's secretary of defense, William Perry, who apparently is regarded as some kind of real genius and serious nuclear war planning thinker, kind of a wonk that Bill Clinton absolutely should have referred to his secretary of defense.
He did it over his secretary of defense's dead body.
And one that, like I'm saying, kind of rose up through the ranks as this ultimate wonk rather than some outsider brought in or some kind of thing like that even.
But so even at the time, and then there's the famous George Kennan interview with Thomas Friedman in 1998 where he says, here's what's going to happen.
All the people who are saying go ahead and expand NATO, the Russians won't mind, we'll incorporate them into NATO even.
It'll be great.
People like Strobe Talbot.
As soon as this backfires and the Russians react, these very same people will say, see, this is why we need NATO expansion to contain this rising czarist Russian empire.
That's, you know, the consequences of the fight that they're picking.
And I wonder whether, I mean, are you the only one over there writing at Foreign Affairs who questions the narrative about this?
Because it seems pretty obvious, especially when it's their Foreign Affairs, it's their Mr. X.
It's their number one gray beard leader wonk that they worship at the high temple of foreign relations.
So what's the deal?
Yeah, well done, Scott, pointing out that irony, particularly with regard to Foreign Affairs, that probably the majority of readership now, the foreign policy elite are on board with NATO expansion and turning a blind eye to this idiotic, self-fulfilling prophecy.
When in fact, it was some of these leading Foreign Affairs thinkers going back to George Kennan who said, don't do it.
It's going to cause a backlash.
It is inevitable.
You can't take advantage of another country's weakness, ram your, you know, your priorities, your military alliance down their throat, endlessly expand right up to their borders, encircle them and not expect some pushback.
Are we out of our minds?
It's logical.
International relations theory teaches us that if it teaches anything.
And a quick look at world history would tell you the same thing.
There is no case where any country could just sit back and watch another great power, military power, encircle it, surround it and just do nothing.
It's just not the way the world works.
If we think somehow we've got some kind of magic pixie dust and our alliances, our military power doesn't threaten, doesn't scare people, but everyone else's does.
Come on.
It's ludicrous.
And let me give you instead of rehashing this because I agree with you completely and I guess I'm just being repetitive.
Let me give you another example unfolding today.
Just a couple of days ago, the U.S. Senate voted 97 to 97 to two to admit a new member to NATO.
Montenegro.
Montenegro is a tiny Balkan, former Yugoslav Republic.
It's only got about a quarter or a third of a million people.
Why is it being admitted to NATO?
Some people point out that there's no threat to the country, certainly not from Russia so far away.
And Montenegro at the same time adds very little to the alliance.
It barely has a police force, much less an army.
What's the urgency of adding yet another NATO member when we know it irritates Russia gratuitously?
Well, when you look at the recent history of Montenegro and how we got here, it just blows your mind.
Montenegro is ruled and has been ruled by one clan, one thug and his allies, a guy named Milo Djukanovic, who, by the way, is about the closest thing in the Balkans you can find to Putin.
He has killed political opponents.
He's deeply corrupt.
He's a thuggish gangster.
And we're turning a blind eye to all of that because we want to bring yet another country into NATO, expand our security system, expand our military footprint when there's no real reason to do so.
And, yeah, the irony here is that if the ostensible bad guy, the threat, is Putin because he's a gangster and a thug and corrupt, well, then Djukanovic is all of that in spades.
What another double standard.
How on earth are we bestowing official Western approval and membership in a key Western alliance to such a tinpot dictator?
And to top it all off, when you join NATO, you're supposed to have a referendum.
Let the people of the country express their will.
After all, it's a major move to switch from non-aligned or Eastern or Western to join a new alliance.
But in Montenegro, because most people don't like the idea, they just dispensed with a referendum.
So the best we have are opinion polls.
And the opinion polls show that barely a third, maybe 35, 36 percent of Montenegrins want to join NATO.
What do we have here when we add all that up?
We have America essentially supporting a thuggish gangster in the Balkans, one of the biggest smugglers of contraband, human trafficking, as well as tobacco and drugs across the Adriatic into Italy, into Europe.
That is widely known.
He's a really bad guy.
He clings to power in that country through corrupt means and, yes, sometimes kills or jails his opponents.
He's not popular.
But by giving him our blessing and all the benefits of NATO expansion, which will mean a lot more money for him, we are sort of choosing him over the people of Montenegro.
Don't tell me this is not going to come back and haunt us someday.
It will.
It's a very bad move.
There's no good reason for it and a lot of cautions as to why we shouldn't do it.
So let me try to play the role of a mini cannon now on this one more instance of NATO expansion and just raise the alarm.
Why are we doing this?
It looks like it has so many downsides and no upside.
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Well, it's funny, too, because if you go back then, the only answer why Robert Taft was wrong and why absolutely we have to put troops in Europe to keep the Soviets out was because it was one special thing.
It wasn't because there was a Russian empire.
It was because Soviet communist ideology bent on world domination made this the extra special exception, which was why we had to have NATO at all, just to keep them out of our allied Western democracies like France and Belgium and Denmark, etc.
Everything east of Germany could go to hell, right?
Sorry to the Hungarians and to the Czechs and whoever else tried to resist because what are we going to do about it?
But now Soviet ideology is gone.
Global communism is dead.
It's not even really communism in North Korea anymore, right?
I mean, whatever you call it there.
And and yet our empire does nothing but push further and further towards them.
It seems like I don't know.
This is part of what bugs me.
I keep bringing this up to all my different guests whenever we talk about Russia.
For some reason, it seems the most important point.
And your article, I think, is partly a recognition of this, a challenge to this.
But Mark Perry, the great Pentagon reporter, says that all the generals believe their own nonsense about the danger of Putin and Russia.
And where you have the McMaster rights and the McGregor rights who have their differences over how tank warfare should be fought in Eastern Europe.
There's just no question about the common narrative about the rise and the danger of Russia.
And I get the idea that that's the same thing at the Council on Foreign Relations as well.
That basically, just like in 2002 and 2003, all serious adults just know that this is the truth.
And the social psychology of the situation more or less prevents your type point of view from getting any real fair hearing.
I mean, I'm glad to see it in foreign affairs.
They ran Mearsheimer one time about the coup in Ukraine as well.
But by and large, it seems like D.C. and New York, they've all drank the Kool-Aid on this.
Am I right about that?
Yeah.
We can talk in a moment about what threat or what – for example, Russia in Ukraine, Russia in Crimea.
Is there a threat to the Baltics?
Is there – we can talk about that separately.
I think that's grossly exaggerated and that in Moscow's eyes, what they did in Ukraine was mainly defensive.
They were grabbing the Crimea, trying to preserve their own bases there because they saw it slipping away and becoming part of NATO.
So it might have seemed aggressive but it had a defensive motivation.
Let's put that aside for a moment though and just ask about maybe the more interesting thing.
You called it social psychology.
I'm trying to understand why the new Russophobia and why this conventional wisdom is so absolute to the point not only that everyone agrees without question but that if you do question or dissent, you're immediately an apologist or you're some kind of puppet of Putin as Hillary herself said.
It's really unhealthy.
It's almost McCarthyite.
When I wonder where it's come from, I see something – I see the following.
This is my diagnosis at least about the current moment.
I understand why people like John McCain, military officers who are paid to see threats and deeply invested in a paranoid worldview, I understand why officials like that are essentially cold warriors.
They will never trust Russia.
They will always inflate the Russian threat.
I get it.
That's sort of the cold war lives on.
What is a little harder to understand is why so many progressives, Hillary Clinton, people – voters who supported her.
I watched Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and it just boggles my mind how the left has become as anti-Russian, as Russophobic as the right.
The best I can say in response is that there's a kind of loyalty to Hillary Clinton and a fury at having lost the election to Donald Trump.
Therefore, it's almost necessary to credit her argument that Trump is Putin's puppet, that Trump couldn't have won unless the Russians intervened massively to undermine our democracy.
There is so much anger at Trump having won, shock, surprise and anger that I get people reading my article who go off the rails after the first five lines because I very gently suggest that Trump has outlined a reasonable approach to Russia.
As you've seen, Scott, you read the whole article.
It's 99 percent about the past.
There's very little Trump in there except at the beginning and then again a little hope at the end.
But I don't go out of my way to praise Trump or analyze the details of his policy.
And yet I find so many progressives, the instant they see any language that doesn't spit on Trump, they stop reading.
They think it's disloyal.
It's pro-Russian.
It's pro-Trump.
How could you?
And they don't even pay attention to the analysis.
And again, there's a lot that goes into that.
But I think much of it has to do with anger at what happened in November 2016, incomprehension that we have this whatever you want to call him, unqualified leader in the White House, unwillingness to admit that maybe the Clintons, their campaign got a lot wrong and that the chief blame in her defeat lies with her and her campaign staff, not with Trump and not with the Russians.
That's what's brought a lot of people on the left, progressives, to line up with the right, the Cold Warriors, in this new Russophobia.
It's not healthy because it means they're not thinking clearly.
They're not being self-critical.
They're not willing to listen to reasonable arguments.
It's just anger, anger, anger, looking for a scapegoat.
Yeah, I think the longer it goes on, the more they have invested in believing it.
It really is just like the birther movement about Obama.
Once you know that this guy's a secret agent of the Kenyans who came and usurped John McCain's rightful throne, you can't really be talked out of that.
You know, it's the same kind of thing here.
It's like a religion.
I would say and I can't predict the future.
I cannot predict the future.
But now we have these hearings, both the House and then the Senate Intelligence Committees, looking into not so much just the Russian hacking.
We have a pretty good idea.
We know what happened with the DNC, the emails and publishing them on WikiLeaks.
We don't know every link in that chain.
We don't know for sure that it was directed by Putin or maybe a rogue operation.
But we have a pretty good idea that Russia interfered.
But what we are supposed to be looking into is did the Trump administration, did Trump election officials know about that in advance?
Did they collude?
Did they coordinate these leaks in order to embarrass Hillary?
Was there direct involvement by Trump officials in Russia's meddling in our politics?
That's what these investigations are supposed to get at.
Correct.
But they're stuck on partisan bickering, and they're not getting any closer to that truth at all.
Well, on those questions, I mean that's already been dismissed outright by Michael Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, and Hillary Ally, who accused Trump of being Putin's puppet last summer before the election, which is profound interference itself.
And James Clapper, both, who both have a vested interest in bolstering this narrative, have both thrown very cold water on it.
I mean Morell even said, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of smoke, but I'm telling you there's no fire.
There's not even a spark.
Forget it.
So that's pretty much the ultimate climb down.
And yet the narrative persists.
And, you know, here's my thing about it, as long as we're talking about it.
I think that Trump, I mean, one of the first things he did after the election was call Putin and have a nice phone call.
And I love the politics of that.
And screw you Democrats, man.
I don't care.
And you Republicans, too.
I don't care what you say.
You know, just like if George Bush can look into his soul and all this, then I can at least be friends with him and invite him to dinner.
And then that's what he should have done.
He should have invited him directly to Washington, D.C., have a nice night out on the town, have some steaks.
And then tomorrow, let's negotiate a reduction in hydrogen bomb capacity.
And that'll stick it to the haters.
That seems to be the Donald Trump method, right, for, you know, kind of using judo and undercutting his opposition.
Like the more they accused him for at least a long time, the more he kept saying, I think it would be good if we get along with Russia, as you quote in the article.
He kind of doesn't want to back down from that statement.
It seems like now is the time to have Putin over, have him to D.C. and make all these people accuse Putin all this stuff to his face.
Watch them all bow and scrape and be polite because they don't really believe their own nonsense, you know.
Here's what could happen.
If you're right and you may well be right, you have good evidence for it.
You've made a persuasive case that these investigations are going to be kind of like the Democrats Benghazi hearings.
A lot of smoke, very little fire.
At a certain point, they'll peter out because they're just not finding anything.
What they're likely to find is people evading taxes.
You know, Manafort or Flynn got paid a speaker's fee, a big consulting contract.
They work for some oligarch.
You know, it's going to look like the whole Cheney, Rumsfeld, Halliburton crowd under the George W. Bush presidency.
Right.
Conflict of interest.
In their case, it was oil.
But it's going to be roughly the same thing.
But as for colluding in Russia's meddling and colluding in the leaks of everything, very unlikely.
So at some point we'll get past that.
And as you say, then real business can begin.
And, you know, Putin himself did something interesting just yesterday.
He gave a major address, a major interview up in Arkhangelsk on the Russian Arctic.
And he, in passing, seemed to be inviting Donald Trump to come to Helsinki in May when they're having a meeting of the Arctic Council.
So all the principal members of the Arctic nations.
That includes us, Canada, Russia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, you know, Denmark.
That they will all get together there and that Trump and Putin could have sort of a little summit on the side.
And, you know, I kind of like that idea because I one of my hobby interests, one of my great concerns is what's going on in the Arctic.
Right.
You know about the declining sea ice, the environmental dangers, all the energy projects that could be very dangerous.
They could be beneficial, but they could bring it horrible environmental destruction.
We need to be cooperating on the Arctic in so many ways because it's changing so fast.
Why not have those two leaders get together and stamp their new detente or at least attempt to put the relationship on a new positive footing?
Why not start in Helsinki working on the Arctic?
You know, sometimes you put Ukraine aside for now, put Syria aside and find some way of cooperating on something new.
Establish a pattern of cooperation.
You know, shut up some of the naysayers and then maybe there'll be a spillover effect into other areas of confrontation, other areas where we need to work together.
Maybe I'm, you know, maybe I'm just looking at clouds and seeing a silver lining.
Maybe I'm, you know, overoptimistic.
But if if leaders matter, well, there's an opportunity right there.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, matters are bad enough that the possibilities are endless for improvement.
Right.
I mean, there's so much that could be done to make things better, like foreswearing ever bringing Ukraine into NATO.
You can just forget that.
You never have to worry about it again.
I promise on the next six presidents behalf, it ain't never going to happen.
Something like that.
Go ahead and break some ice and do something good.
It seems obvious enough.
I mean, Ronald Reagan was within a hair's breadth of negotiating an end to all nuclear weapons in Soviet and American stocks back in 1986.
So if he can do that, you know, Obama talks a good game, but Trump could actually carry it out.
Yeah.
I'm not confident that he can for two reasons.
I wish now I'm going to contradict myself and go from the Pollyanna to the gloom and doom.
But, you know, Trump has yet to demonstrate that he can carry through on policy.
He's got to stop all the self-inflicted wounds, all the silly tweeting, undermining himself.
He's causing a civil war in the Republican Party, for God's sakes.
And he's got to get serious about politics.
I'm not sure he's demonstrated that he can.
That's one thing.
Even if he were, of course, he's dealing with so much anti-Russian hostility that it'll be hard to push an agreement through Washington.
So there are two big obstacles on the Western side.
One is the whole political elite and one is Trump is his own worst enemy.
If he could put forward some serious proposals, meet Putin halfway, what will really surprise the world is that Putin may well come the other distance and meet us in the middle.
Many people, as I write in the article, are convinced that Putin only wants confrontation.
He actually likes confrontation because it gives him, you know, a foreign threat that he uses to whip up nationalism and keep his popularity high at home.
That's way too simplistic.
Most Russians support his foreign policy because they support his foreign policy.
But as we've seen, they're willing to speak out on corruption.
Economic standards have slipped because of low oil prices, because of the sanctions.
They're hurting economically.
He's responsive to that.
He's not, in my estimation, irremediably hostile like some kind of a Stalin or a Hitler that he keeps getting compared to.
I think we can do business with him.
Got to meet him halfway.
I'm not optimistic because I look at what's happened since the inauguration.
It doesn't instill confidence that our side is coherent enough to accomplish anything.
I hope, but I don't expect.
Yeah, I mean, it's not like he really has the vision for it.
So if anything, we could hope that maybe just to spite his political enemies, he'll do something peaceful, you know, maybe just to make them mad.
But was it this same talk that Putin gave the other day where he asked rhetorically something along the lines of, do we really want to return to the Cuban missile crisis and this kind of level of confrontation?
Because I think when Putin talks like that, that people have got to really start paying attention just because we're so sure everything we do is sunshine and defensiveness.
Like you're saying, it doesn't look that way to them at all, apparently.
That it was the same set of remarks at that Arctic conference in Helsinki and in Arkhangelsk in Russia, where he gave a long interview to the moderator and was asked a series of questions about what's happening in Washington, what's happening, you know, all around the world.
Yeah, sometimes he you know, if we would listen instead of just demonizing, we discover that he poses some important questions and make some very salient points.
I don't love Putin.
I don't think he's a good guy.
He's a state leader protecting his national national interests.
His state is not exactly like ours.
His system is, you know, highly authoritarian.
But we get along.
We've dealt with authoritarian or dictatorial leaders all around the world to mutual benefit when it suited us.
And this is one relationship because we both have so many nuclear weapons, because they are so pivotal in everything that happens in Europe and Asia that we we need to get back on the right track.
And we cannot be so self-righteous that we think all blame accrues to Putin and that all change must come from his side.
It's going to be a two way street or it won't go anywhere.
All right.
So that's Robert David English.
He is associate professor of international relations, Slavic languages and literature and environmental studies at USC.
And he's written this very important article for Foreign Affairs, Russia, Trump and a new detente fixing U.S.-Russian relations.
Thanks again for coming on the show, Robert.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
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