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Okay, introducing the great Ted Galen Carpenter from the Cato Institute.
You can run any article by him on your website, and you can be confident, without even reading it, that he doesn't propose bombing anyone just a little bit, ever.
It's always good.
Always good stuff.
Ted Carpenter.
This one is at the national interest.
How Kosovo Poisoned America's Relationship with Russia.
Welcome back to the show, Ted.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thanks very much for having me back.
Very happy to have you here, and especially happy to read this great article and learn about the Kosovo War, which I was paying attention to in 1999, and, of course, opposed.
But you know what?
I was only, I think, a junior in high school, or a sophomore junior, around the time of the original breakup of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian War, and all that passed me by.
I've learned about it as much as I can, kind of after the fact.
But it wasn't really until the Kosovo War.
I mean, in Iraq-sanctioned stuff, but as far as the Balkans, it's just all those names and all those consonants, they're all so impossible to pronounce and therefore memorize, and who could possibly understand such a complicated subject?
But hey, that's why I got you.
So I was wondering, before we get to the Kosovo War, because as you say in the article, you do bring up the original Bosnia intervention there, too, and what all it has to do with America's relationship with Russia, can you take us back to the end of the Cold War and the disillusion of the Soviet Empire?
And I know Yugoslavia was somewhat independent of the Soviet Empire, there was a communist dictatorship, and then the whole thing fell apart, and then what happened?
Well, Russia at that time seemed really friendly toward the West, wanted to emulate Western values, particularly Western economic values.
And President Boris Yeltsin appointed a series of rather pro-Western prime ministers.
Relations seemed to be very much on the mend after the Cold War.
And then the United States did two things that began to change Russian attitudes toward a much more negative direction.
One was the intervention in Bosnia.
The Balkans had long been a Russian sphere of influence, ethnic and religious ties to the Serbs in particular, but there was general Russian interest in the Balkans.
The United States and NATO intrudes into that with not even a buy-your-leave to Moscow, and adopted an extremely biased policy, one directed toward weakening the Serbs, which were Moscow's primary clients.
We in the United States tended to portray the Bosnian Civil War as this melodrama featuring the Serbs as snidely whiplash, the Muslims as sweetenel being tied to railroad tracks, and the United States and NATO playing the role of Dudley Do-Right riding to the rescue.
Well, to say that that view oversimplified a very complex struggle is an understatement.
But Russia really resented that intervention.
Then Washington followed the Bosnia intervention up with the first stage of NATO expansion.
So Moscow is becoming increasingly suspicious of Western intentions.
And then with the aftermath of the initial NATO expansion, the US and NATO intervenes in Kosovo to detach a province from a sovereign state that had not attacked the United States or any other NATO member.
And at that point, I think Russia feels that it is becoming the target of very unfriendly Western moves.
And interestingly enough, the appointment of prime ministers becomes less and less pro-Western.
You have Yevgeny Primakov first in late 1998 and into 1999, who is very much a nationalist, and then you get the appointment of one Vladimir Putin.
And that really signals that Russia has had it with the West and its actions.
Well, in fact, I remember how that worked out, too.
Yeltsin resigned and handed the presidency to Putin on his New Year's Eve, 1999, at the turn of the millennium, and it was, what, three months before the presidential election.
So it would be basically like if Bill Clinton had resigned a few months and gone ahead and let Al Gore be the president for the last few months of the campaign against Bush, that kind of thing, to make sure that he won.
Yeah.
And Putin was known as very much a strong nationalist with his KGB background, certainly not friendly to democratic values.
I think everyone realized this guy has a rather serious authoritarian streak.
And relations between Russia and the West continue to deteriorate after that.
And it just is a downward spiral that continues to this day.
And it has really, really reached worrisome proportions.
All right.
So I want to talk about Bush-Obama years and NATO expansion and all that.
But if we can stick with the Balkans here for a minute, I'm sure pretty much anything that I could try to sum up what I thought I learned would be oversimplifying and stuff.
But that's the point of having an interview show.
You can take my statements as a question and clarify all you want.
But I think I learned somewhere that actually when Bosnia was, when Yugoslavia was originally breaking up, that the Serbs were outnumbered, basically, and that the was it was the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims had the coalition government and the Serbs were going to have to take like third place, loser place.
But the deal that was in the works at the time had granted them plenty of autonomy so that it didn't really matter.
They didn't really care.
They were, you know, it was going to be OK and that they had supported the deal, even though they weren't going to be part of the ruling coalition.
They went ahead and said that this is a good enough deal, but that then the Americans screwed it up.
And there was some ambassador named Zimmerman or something like that who had said, no, no, no.
Don't go along with this perfectly workable peace deal.
Let's have a war instead.
And that that was what really had had taken what already obviously was a very tense situation and finally threw gas in a match on it.
Is that right at all?
That's that's basically correct.
The Serbs were ambivalent.
They might have been satisfied with autonomy within an independent Bosnia, but they were very uneasy about it.
And there was a lot of sentiment in the Serb portion of Bosnia to have either an independent republic or to merge with Serbia.
If Yugoslavia was going to break up, that either option seemed to be quite appealing to the Serbs.
The U.S. attitude then and later seemed to be every ethnic group in the disintegrating Yugoslavia had a right to self-determination and independence, except for the Serbs.
Any other group, the Slovenes seceded and formed an independent Slovenia.
Croatia seceded from the disintegrating Yugoslavia, formed an independent republic.
Bosnia declared independence, even though there was very little in the way of national unity within that new entity.
Later on, you got Macedonia and Montenegro declaring independence.
And again, the U.S. and its allies had no problem with any of those actions.
But when the Serbs sought to separate, Bosnian Serbs sought to separate from this newly minted independent country of Bosnia, that was utterly intolerable.
And the logic behind that position always escaped me unless there just was a total bias against the Serbs and aiming to weaken a entity that was considered a Russian client.
And I think that was probably the underlying reason for Washington's position.
And this is what really helped to cause the outbreak of the war that then, according to all sides, was horrible on all sides, right?
I mean, how many people died in that thing?
The best estimate after a study by the United Nations and another one by the European Union, approximately 106,000 people.
Now, in terms of the propaganda campaign directed against the Bosnian Serbs and indirectly against the Serbian government, you got much larger estimates.
This was part of the propaganda offensive.
So you've seen figures, people like Bob Dole, repeated the highest possible estimates, usually around 250,000 dead, and implying that the vast, vast majority of them were civilians.
That's absolutely untrue.
The 106,000 figure has now pretty well been established as the death toll.
About half of that consisted of military fatalities, and almost half of that consisted of Serb military fatalities.
And we're still talking about the Bosnian conflict in circa 94, 95, right?
That is correct.
And yet that was portrayed as genocide.
These are rather garden-variety tolls for any civil war.
It's tragic.
Obviously, it's tragic for the victims and their families.
But it certainly did not even come close to constituting genocide.
And yet the U.S. and its allies portrayed the Serbs in Bosnia as genocidal monsters, and that their conduct justified the NATO military intervention.
Right.
Now, so everybody knows, Ted, that the hero Richard Holbrooke, because never mind what happened before that.
Something, something, and then there was this war, and who knows what America might have had to do with that.
But then came in Richard Holbrooke, and he saved the day.
The brilliant diplomat came in, and he came up with the Dayton Accords that solved everything.
And yet I heard, contrary to that, I believe from Nobodz Samalich, he said, listen, what really happened there was they took a black magic marker.
And they said what had been these sort of soft de facto lines, you know, in practice as they were shaking out on the ground.
Now we're going to draw solid lines on a map and call these international borders.
And just ignore the fact that that meant immediately that you had X number of thousands of people of all different descriptions stuck on the, quote, wrong side of the lines.
And now they either have to run like hell or be forced off of their property in order for all of this to shake out.
And that, in essence, the Dayton Accords, you know, I don't know when the peace supposedly kicked in, but at least for a while made matters worse.
Is that right?
Well, the fighting did end rather soon after that agreement was signed, or I should say imposed.
I mean, this really was not a case of real negotiations.
The U.S. and its allies essentially imposed that settlement.
But what it did was create an international colony with an appointed official who held most of the power.
This was the U.N. high representative, and what a pretentious term that was.
And the three main ethnic groups still did not get along.
There was enough autonomy that they were able to run their affairs to some extent, and that at least reduced the incentive to restart the war.
But Bosnia to this day is a joke, a pretend country.
Without all the international financial inputs and the international bureaucrats running a lot of the affairs, this country would not function at all.
It wouldn't have a meaningful economy.
It would not have a degree of political order that would allow much of anything to take place.
So here we are two decades, more than two decades later, and it's still an utterly dysfunctional international ward.
And that is the great success, in quotes, of the Dayton Accords.
OK, but so, I mean, I guess I could say it sounds like it couldn't possibly have been any other way once you create a high commissar for running things over there on the U.N. level.
But so let me put it this way.
If they had quickly butted out and tried to let Bosnia, as Donald Rumsfeld would say, take the training wheels off and let them go ahead and see if they can have a state on their own without all this intervention, could they maybe pull it off?
In other words, just because the U.N. and NATO and whoever, whatever bureaucracies would never back off of their expanded mission that they had doesn't necessarily mean that that was necessary, right?
Well, I think in the lead up to the Dayton Accords, the Bosnian Civil War was beginning to draw to a close.
And I suspect what you would have had, a settlement at some point, probably within the next year or two, is a negotiated settlement among the parties.
The Croatian section of Bosnia probably would have decided to merge with Croatia.
You would have an independent, overwhelmingly Muslim state, largely in the center of the country.
And then the Serbs would have the decision to make whether they have an independent Bosnian Serb Republic or to merge with Serbia.
But had the West just allowed this civil war to shake out the way most civil wars eventually shake out and come to a conclusion, there would have likely been a stable, long-lasting settlement instead of this entirely artificial creation that could not ever exist on its own in any kind of viable fashion.
What we have now, the U.S. and Western bureaucrats just kick the can down the road and continue to kick it down the road.
Well, I don't know why you're talking about Afghanistan.
I was asking you about Bosnia.
It's the same story over and over again, isn't it?
They do seem to recur.
Similar themes, similar failures.
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Oh, man.
All right.
So, now, Kosovo.
First of all, the reason that I interrupted you a second ago to say, now, we're still talking about Bosnia-94, right?
It's because you were talking about the controversy over the body count and the 100,000 and this and that.
And I thought, well, wait a minute.
Did I just space out and miss him, change the subject to Kosovo-99?
Because this is certainly a controversy there.
I remember reading John Pilger, just disgusted.
Not that he's the best source on everything, necessarily.
I guess I'll say that, but I like him.
And he was there and he said the FBI were just disgusted.
And they just up and left.
And what they were disgusted about wasn't the rotting corpses in the mass grave.
It was the complete and utter and total lack of them.
And after two weeks, they quit even looking and went home.
Because they just, it didn't happen.
The 100,000 dead Albanian, Kosovar Albanian civilians butchered at the hands of Milosevic's Serb forces was a figment of Bill Clinton's imagination or, you know, outright lie made up by him in his White House, right?
Well, you had U.S. officials citing the 100,000 estimate.
I've seen some estimates from U.S. officials as high as 200,000.
The reality is the total number of fatalities appears to have been about 3,000.
And this was an insurgency that had been going on for close to two years.
So, again, this was portrayed as genocide.
And if that's something that constitutes genocide, that toll, then every conflict between two or more religious, ethnic, or racial groups constitutes genocide.
This was ridiculously hyped.
And I don't want to say that the Serbian forces were necessarily gentle types.
They certainly were not.
They were battling an insurgency, and they could be brutal at times.
But so was the Kosovo Liberation Army, the insurgents.
They attacked Serb civilians and committed a lot of atrocities on their own.
And once they got into power, thanks to the NATO air war against Serbia, they committed an assortment of atrocities.
The U.S. and its allies justified the intervention to prevent ethnic cleansing.
They said, yeah, the Serbs really hadn't done that much, but they had plans to basically chase the Albanian population in Kosovo right out of the province, just completely ethnically cleanse it.
There's almost no evidence that they had a plan to do that.
But once the NATO war was complete, the new Albanian-dominated government in Kosovo did ethnically cleanse some 240,000 people, and not just Serbs, a lot of other ethnic minorities as well.
So this was done on NATO's watch.
NATO did nothing about it, kept very quiet about it.
And to this day, the Western news media have said next to nothing about it.
So the war crimes that supposedly justified the intervention, most of them occurred after the intervention.
And that wasn't the extent of what the Kosovo Liberation Army did.
Later, a later investigation found that they had deliberately murdered prisoners of war to harvest their organs and sell them on the international black market.
Now, that strikes me as a bit of a war crime.
And yet you had people like Senator Joe Lieberman on the eve of the NATO intervention saying that the Kosovo Liberation Army and America stood for the same values.
If that's the case, I'm really ashamed of American values.
Yeah, well, of course, they always just cherry pick and say, look, these people named a street after Bill Clinton.
They love us.
It doesn't matter who they are necessarily.
It doesn't matter the rest of the context, right?
What a great statue.
And yeah, you know, people can look up, it's the yellow house, right?
They repainted it blue, but everybody knew that's the yellow house where they're stealing people's organs.
The people who run that state now, that state there in Kosovo.
So, well, now let me ask you this because I know you hear this all the time.
Even, you know, people arguing sort of the dove's case on the Russia issue that, you know, all this hype about the Russians taking Crimea in the way that they did.
Well, you know, the Americans helped break off Kosovo from Serbia.
So how do you like that and that kind of thing?
But my thing is that never mind the interventions by the outside powers as far as that.
I just want to ask about the question of what I consider to be the curse of the old world, which is all these ethnic divisions and then multiply that by all the borders being in all the wrong places.
So if you want, you can have 10 million wars from now on over where the lines really should be because of the ethnic minority, this group that lives within that state and that kind of thing.
But as you said, hey, nobody cared when the rest of Yugoslavia broke apart and the Slovaks went this way and these people went that way and whatever when Czechoslovakia broke up.
And so, hey, if the Serbs ought to have been able to secede from Yugoslavia just like everybody else, well, then the Kosovars should have been able to secede from the Serbs, too.
It's just really the question I think we're talking about here is, you know, of course, the American violence and intervention to make it that way and all the lies surrounding it and all of that.
But I guess what I'm trying to get at, if I could figure out a way to phrase it right, Ted, is what do we do?
Because that is the curse of the old world that, you know, between I mean, I guess these we don't really have a problem between the Spanish and the Portuguese or whatever, but pretty much anywhere east of that, there's a fight over where the line should be.
And it seems like there's not really a workable way for these things to be resolved peaceably because people, you know, those who control states have just too much to live in allowing any of these lines to ever budge, right?
Well, that is one of many problems.
And the American founders, starting with George Washington, understood that the U.S. had nothing at all to gain by getting entangled in those kinds of quarrels.
They understood that Europe was very much a violent region, that the issues at stake had nothing to do with genuine American interests and well-being.
And they were wise enough to keep their distance and keep the United States out of those conflicts.
Our leaders over roughly the past century, especially starting with the infamous Woodrow Wilson, have managed to get the United States entangled into more and more and more quarrels, not just in Europe, of course, Middle East, Southeast Asia, good many other regions.
And although there are some special interests, like defense contractors, who benefit handsomely from that kind of policy, the overwhelming majority of Americans do not.
And all we have had is an endless series of needless wars and a lot of heartache for the American people and a lot of wasting American wealth.
It's been a tragic foreign policy.
What the United States did in the Balkans is kind of a textbook example of what not to do in the way of a wise foreign policy.
All right, so Ted, I'm sorry, and I know you got to go here pretty soon, but in regards to America and Russia's relationship now, this guy Putin, as you put it before, he is a Russian nationalist.
He's certainly no pushover for America's interests there.
Washington, D.C., they just absolutely hate this guy.
And, you know, Mark Perry, the great Pentagon reporter, I asked him about this, and he said virtually everybody at the Pentagon, whether they're the pro-McMaster or the pro-McGregor types, they virtually all believe that Russia is the aggressor and that it's the rise of the new Russian empire and that their aggression must be checked and defended against in Eastern Europe.
And that's the part that really scares me, is that they don't really know they're lying, that they ignore their NATO expansion and what that looks like to the Russians.
They ignore the various color-coded revolutions, the most recent being not so much a color-coded one, but the coup d'etat in Ukraine in February of 2014 and all the consequences, the war and the Crimean crisis and everything that came with that.
And they just ignore their role in all of this.
And they've convinced themselves, apparently, that something must be done to contain the Russians.
And I think you already made the case, and I already agree with you, so I'm not going to waste everybody's time on that, that it's really not that way.
I mean, he is who he is, as you described, but it's the American expansionist policy that's created all these crises.
But now they're reacting, and we're reacting to their reaction, just like George Kennan predicted would happen back 20 years ago.
And so now what do we do?
Because how are we ever going to talk D.C. out of their collective kind of hysteria here about what is going on, and that they're the heroes trying to put everything right when they're the ones creating the crisis?
Yeah, that's exactly the problem.
I mean, this would be bad enough if you were dealing with a mid-sized power with very limited capabilities.
Let's remember, Russia is the one country that has the weaponry that, if there is a miscalculation and there is a U.S.-Russian full-scale war, Russia has the capability to do so much damage as to effectively end American civilization.
No other country has that military capability yet, not even China.
And that reality should dictate to U.S. policymakers, be very cautious with Russia.
Don't go out of your way to provoke a country with those kinds of military capabilities.
That's very unwise.
And expanding a military alliance to the very borders of that country is going to be interpreted by any Russian leader, not just Vladimir Putin.
As a deeply unfriendly act, trying to manipulate a situation that was very volatile in Ukraine to encourage demonstrators to overthrow a democratically elected pro-Russian government is going to be interpreted as a very unfriendly act by any Russian government, not just Vladimir Putin.
American policymakers are oblivious to how U.S. actions are being perceived and would be perceived by any Russian government in that position.
And the tensions are rising.
Relations between Moscow and Washington are easily at their worst point since the end of the Cold War.
Some scholars still dispute that we're in a second Cold War.
I think they're engaging in wishful thinking.
I believe we're already well into a second Cold War, and this one has even greater potential than the original to turn hot.
And that is something all Americans ought to worry about, and especially for the people who, in many cases for partisan reasons, are exploiting the current Russian hysteria to try to unseat Donald Trump as president.
They are playing not with fire, they are playing with nitroglycerin.
And this could have tragic consequences for all of the American people.
One up.
Hydrogen fusion.
Man, how about that?
It's got to be hotter than the sun to even get those isotopes to fuse.
That's why, as Daniel Ellsberg says, you need the Nagasaki bomb to be the blasting cap to set off your H-bomb.
That's the kind of fire they're playing with here.
And yeah, you're right, especially over these narrow political partisan interests with just complete willful ignorance about the possible consequences.
It's absolutely amazing.
That doesn't mean that Putin's government is any kind of model of a tolerant, open society.
It definitely is not.
But one of the great tasks of effective diplomacy is dealing with countries that can be difficult at times.
And wise diplomacy, again, means that you don't go out of your way to antagonize other countries.
The U.S., over the past several decades, has gone out of its way in many regions of the world to needlessly antagonize other countries and needlessly entangle this country in a lot of parochial quarrels that have no realistic connection to genuine American interests.
And yet, of course, from the Russian point of view, mean everything.
Messing around in Georgia.
Messing around in the Baltics.
Messing around in Ukraine, in Syria.
These are primary Russian interests, even if they mean nothing to the American people, other than a few vested interests here and there connected politically.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And imagine, again, a role reversal.
Imagine how we would feel if Russia or China or any other major power was messing around in the Caribbean and Central America and beginning to flirt with maybe forming an alliance with Canada to hem in the United States and to intimidate, to cow the United States.
I would venture to think that most Americans would regard those maneuvers as extremely threatening and hostile.
Why do we assume that the Russians react differently when the United States and its allies do those kinds of provocative actions in Russia's immediate neighborhood?
Right.
All right, listen, thank you so much for coming back on my show, Ted.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
All right, so that is the great Ted Galen Carpenter.
He is running foreign policy over there at the Cato Institute.
This one is at The National Interest.
How Kosovo Poisoned America's Relationship with Russia.
Great one.
I'm Scott Horton.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org.
Follow me on Twitter.
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