Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Okay, you guys on the line.
I got Ted Galen Carpenter, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and regular writer for the National Interest and Cato.
And of course, over at the American Conservative as well.
And, you know, we just talked about this a few weeks ago in the context, you know, starting with the Kurtz straight crisis, pseudo crisis thing there.
But boy, here's a new article and it's just so interesting.
And, well, you're going to find out all about it in a second.
NATO partisans started a new Cold War with Russia.
Oh, there you go.
Just blaming America first.
Ted, welcome back to the show.
How you doing?
Thank you very much, Scott.
Good to be back.
Very happy to talk to you, sir.
So the deal is that, especially, you know, for the kiddos, there was this thing called, well, according to some, world communism based out of Moscow.
And then Nixon and Kissinger brilliantly split the Chinese off from the Russian Soviet bloc in the 1970s.
And then Soviet communism completely fell apart in 1988 through 1991.
And America was victorious in the Cold War.
And then ever since then, everything's been fine until Vladimir Putin launched his revanchist, aggressive policy to reconquer Eastern Europe.
Right?
That's pretty much the party line that the deterioration of relations between Russia and the United States kind of began in 2008 when the Russian-Georgian war broke out.
And this is supposedly a case of outright Russian aggression against its small neighbor.
The reality is, as a European Union commission investigation found, the Georgian side started the fighting, launched the combat operations.
But NATO partisans don't let facts get in the way when they have a good narrative to push.
And then, supposedly, relations really went downhill when the Russians committed such terrible aggression against Ukraine, seizing the Crimean peninsula, and supporting a separatist movement in Eastern Ukraine.
And if you can find much of any truth in that, I give you a tremendous amount of credit, because that really is a self-serving myth.
And the reality is that problems with Russia began much, much earlier and were almost entirely the result of actions taken by the United States and its NATO allies.
And indeed, problems began in the 1990s with the Clinton administration.
So, what, it was six months ago or something, they finally declassified a bunch of records at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, where they showed—and I guess people had said it was sort of part of the mythology.
Well, they never had it in writing.
It was always just a handshake or a wink or a deal or something.
But here it was in writing, that the Americans had promised in no uncertain terms to the Gorbachev government, if he would pull his troops out of Germany and allow the reunification of Germany, that they would not expand the NATO military alliance one inch east of Germany.
And so, how long did it take before they broke that promise?
Well, first of all, that is a tremendous concession on the part of the Soviet government, because they not only accepted German reunification, if you got the history of the relationship between Germany and first Russia and then the Soviet Union, that's a big compromise.
But they agreed to a united Germany within NATO.
And in exchange, the informal promise, commitment, was that NATO would not expand beyond the eastern border of a united Germany.
And for years, the U.S. side argued that, well, there's nothing in writing, which is true.
But think about that.
How does that inspire confidence in other countries to say, hey, sucker, you didn't get it in writing?
That's not the way an honorable society operates.
It's certainly not the way even a semi-honorable government operates.
The United States then, within just a matter of a few years, by the mid-1990s, was pushing the expansion of NATO.
And again, keep in mind, this takes place years before Vladimir Putin even becomes the head of the Russian state, much less launches any kind of military operations against neighboring countries.
Hang on just one sec for me.
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All right, so now who's this Robert Gates character?
Robert Gates was Secretary of Defense under both George W. Bush and for the first, oh, little over two years, Barack Obama's administration.
And who was he before that?
Yeah, I mean, and before that, he's CIA director.
I mean, he has establishment credentials that nobody can possibly challenge.
This man is a charter member of the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishment.
But he was very troubled by how the United States and its NATO allies were treating Russia.
He felt it was a very short-sighted policy that the United States was acquiring a reputation for being duplicitous, for really pushing NATO expansion, seemingly willing to bring in any East European country, including eventually Georgia and Ukraine.
And the only country that would be excluded from NATO membership was Russia.
Now, amazingly, U.S. officials actually argue, at the time and today, that NATO expansion was not directed against Russia.
It wasn't directed against any country.
I keep wondering if U.S. officials who made that argument thought that the Russians were gullible enough to believe that, or – and I think this is even more worrisome – they believed their own propaganda.
They actually thought, no, this is just spreading sweetness and light, liberal institutions further east into Europe.
That'll create greater stability, and everybody benefits, including Russia.
Again, I don't know whether they're trying to fool the Russians or they're actually fooling themselves, but either way, it was an absolutely disastrous policy.
That puts the United States and Russia on the path to a new Cold War.
And again, this begins in the 1990s, long before Vladimir Putin even arguably does anything to provoke the West.
Now, I remember from that time the discussions about NATO expansion on TV, but I wasn't reading all about it and that kind of thing the way I would be now.
But it's amazing for me to look at the history of it, where I say, well, of course, Ted Carpenter over at Cato was arguing that this is a huge mistake and we should not do this, as we talked about on the show last time.
But the fact that your allies included McNamara and included, at that time, the sitting Secretary of Defense, William Perry, and included Paul Nitze and George Kennan and all of the people whose opinion should have counted to say that this is going too far, that from the Russian point of view, this will be considered major aggression, and that that is the overriding factor here, but somehow you guys lost anyway.
So, how's that?
That's the part that's a little confusing, but not really, but I know some of the story.
But who won out?
Strobe Talbot won out with what argument?
Well, you had an interesting coalition pushing NATO expansion.
You have the people who believe that a U.S.-controlled, liberal, supposedly rules-based international system is the wave of the future.
This is the way to ensure global peace and prosperity.
The reality is, as I pointed out in an article in The National Interest a couple months ago, that this was largely hypocrisy.
The United States and its allies have violated the so-called international rules numerous, numerous, numerous times, whenever it suited them, basically.
So, that was fraudulent, but Talbot and others were pushing that.
And then, of course, you have the defense contractors, the weapons manufacturers, who saw a fantastic new market in Eastern Europe, especially if those countries were able to join NATO, because different rules apply if countries are formal allies of the United States than if they're considered neutrals and perhaps unreliable and so on.
Weapon sales are far less restrictive, and you're talking about a multi-multi-billion-dollar-a-year market.
It's no accident that one of the leaders of the Committee to Enlarge NATO was a vice president of one of the leading defense firms.
I would like to think that he did this simply because he believed that was the best policy for the nation and that he was a true patriot.
But when you consider what he and his company had at stake in pushing that policy, it does at least make one wonder.
Yeah, and by the way, the great footnote on that, and there are many, but the very best one is Richard Cummings.
Originally for Playboy.com, Lockheed's stock and two smoking barrels, which is the story of Bruce Jackson, the executive vice president from Lockheed.
Part one of it is how he had created this Committee for NATO Expansion in the 90s and then followed up with the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in the 2000s, mostly pushing humanitarian propaganda for the war in 2002 and 2003.
Just fascinating stuff there.
Yeah, and of course, he doesn't have to be honest even with himself about what he's doing, right?
Never mind all that.
We can just be behaviorists about this.
Bruce Jackson had a conflict of interest regardless of what he believed in pushing this kind of thing.
And then we talked about this a bit before, too, is that Strobe Talbot, who was, I forget what, because I think he was nominated for something and didn't get it and so was relegated to something else.
But he was one of the guys in the Clinton years and Clinton's former roommate at Oxford when they were Rhodes Scholars, his good friend going back.
And he was one of the ones in the administration really pushing this.
And I think we talked before about how he had this narrative where, and I think this was part of his version of the story, was we're going to have this NATO-Russia Council where eventually we're on a path to possibly even integrating Russia into NATO.
We'll just be one big white army of the North and everything will be fine.
And I guess it's pretty obvious why the Americans didn't want to share power with the Russians in NATO.
So you could see why there are a lot of conflicts against that plan.
But was that really his plan and that was part of how he rationalized that this is going to be fine, is that the Russians won't mind because this is going to be including them at some point?
Well, the United States doesn't even like to share power with longtime allies like Britain, France, and Germany.
So you can imagine how they would react about sharing real decision-making power with Russia.
Most of the officials in the Clinton administration, this was true later on of the George W. Bush administration as well, didn't really trust the Russians at all.
They felt that democracy was very fragile.
And you're talking about a group of people who in their formative years were taught that the Soviet Union slashed Russia and they really didn't make much of a distinction between the totalitarian Soviet Union and a newly democratic Russia, that this was a country that could not be trusted.
So most of the comments from Talbot and others that this is not really directed against Russia, this is a new security system, NATO has a new focus, a new role.
So there's nothing threatening here.
There's nothing menacing here.
I'm really not sure how sincerely Talbot or those making that argument really were.
I think some were.
Some actually drank the Kool-Aid and believed that this was not a hostile action toward Russia.
But there were a lot of others, I think, who saw this as, well, we have not only won the Cold War, we're going to press this advantage to the hilt and move NATO right up to the borders of the Russian Federation.
And that is, in fact, the policy that was adopted.
Whatever the motive, that was the net result.
And Russian leaders, not surprisingly, regarded that as a very hostile, very provocative action.
Yeah.
And even though William Perry, the Secretary of Defense, warned against it, the Pentagon wanted it, right?
I mean, this was really a big part of their policy was we won this Cold War fair and square and we're taking what's ours, Eastern Europe.
Well, they get two things.
One, they get not only a victory lap, but a new mission that keeps their budgets going for a very long time.
And secondly, their allies in the defense industry get vast new contracts going forward about as far as the eye can see.
So, although some members of the foreign policy establishment recognized just how dangerous NATO expansion would be and how that would create a new Cold War, and they warned against it, a majority of the foreign policy establishment and their media allies enthusiastically pushed NATO expansion.
So, people like Kennan and Gates and so on, these were in the minority, even within the foreign policy establishment.
Oh, yeah.
And I was going to ask you, was Gates publicly dissenting about this at the time or he's just saying this now?
He did make some comments at the time, but he was not one of the leading lights opposing NATO expansion.
Yeah.
He was the guy leading the CIA when they had no idea that the Soviet Union was falling apart because he was too busy lying about it.
That's the story, the way Ray McGovern tells it, his former boss in the Soviet division.
Well, it's entirely possible.
Again, I don't know whether the CIA knew that the Soviet Union was much weaker economically than it was and just pushed a false narrative.
Or again, if they were expected to come up with this result that the Soviet Union had this large, capable economy, and so they saw everything through that prism, whether this was self-deception or just deliberate propaganda.
I don't know, and without full access to all the classified documents, I'm not sure we'll ever know.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the nice version of that is the accusation, according to Ray McGovern.
The job of a CIA analyst is to say, no, boss, I mean, that's just not right.
I don't give a damn what the politicians want to hear.
This is the analysis, not that.
And that to go along with because Bill Casey wants to make the Russian threat seem worse, we're going to do that, is a betrayal of the truth and the American people, essentially, and of the job, supposedly.
I don't know if I believe that part, but the job supposedly is to stand up to that kind of thing.
Certainly, that is the ideal, but human beings are human beings.
And the reality is, if you keep telling your bosses things they don't want to hear, suddenly you're going to get assigned to the CIA office in some very small, very poor sub-Saharan African country.
Yeah.
You're not going to get one of the PLOM assignments.
And people knowing that, that affects how they see things, whether they intend to do that or whether they don't.
Yeah.
I remember that was even, they were kind of a public laughingstock at the time.
How could the CIA not know that the Soviet Union was ceasing to exist until we all were watching it on Brokaw?
Why do we even have these guys anyway?
Even Daniel Patrick Moynihan was like, well, we can abolish the CIA now, which that didn't last very long, but there was some talk of that at the time.
They're like, well, they proved to be good for nothing, so.
Yeah, but it was a very entrenched institution and it wasn't about to give up its mission.
But again, the agency has missed so many things.
The record of either deception or incompetence or some kind of combination of the two is really striking.
Not only had that huge miss, gee, our chief geostrategic rival is about to collapse.
It has an economy less than a third of what we thought it had.
That's a tremendous miss.
But I mean, they were giving reports out in late 1978 that the Shah of Iran was secure in power, that some of these demonstrations that were beginning, they're no big deal, don't worry about it.
They missed a little thing called 9-11.
The CIA track record is not one that's very impressive.
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So now, it's hard to do, you know, all of Bush and Obama years here, you know, color coded revolutions.
And then you already mentioned the, the Georgia war of 2008.
And, and the coup in, well, two different coups, really 2004.
And then the one in 2014, that you mentioned in Ukraine there.
But you know, Robert Gates was actually in the White House, as you mentioned there at the beginning, under George Bush and under Barack Obama, I have to guess, I don't have the exact calendar and timeline in front of me.
But I have to guess during this policy of continued NATO expansion.
And is there any record of him trying to talk Bush or Obama out of this?
Or this is just in his memoirs.
He's being brave and saying some good things, at least quotable things, but there is mainly in his memoirs, but there are some indications that he was trying to put the brakes on NATO expansion.
And he made a distinction between the first wave of expansion, he really didn't object to bringing in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the very first wave of expansion, except he thought that the Clinton administration was doing it a little too quickly.
But he did become nervous about the second round, bringing in countries like the Baltic Republics.
And when people within the US government were pushing for yet another round to bring in Ukraine and Georgia, that's where he dug in his heels and said, hey, we are really getting into Russia's close security zone.
And he's enough of a realist within the foreign policy camp, that he recognizes almost any major power is going to react very badly to that sort of thing.
So it's not just in his memoirs, but I think he fleshed it out rather substantially in his memoirs.
It's so unfortunate that all this narrative about Russia and the meddling in the election and this and that makes it seem like to have an adult conversation about America's relationship with Russia is treason for Putin to say anything reasonable about what's going on or what should be done.
But I don't buy that.
So I want to know if you and Doug and the Cato guys were running the National Security Council, what would America's Russia policy look like starting now?
Well, we would certainly recommend backing off, abandoning all talk of bringing in Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance.
And in fact, I have already developed a strategy, which I'm going to outline in my new book on NATO that comes out in the spring about how to phase NATO out over a five year period.
In other words, U.S. withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty preceded by a gradual withdrawal of all U.S. military forces from Europe.
And if the Europeans want to develop their own Europeans only security apparatus, either through the European Union or through some new organization, that's their decision.
And I would respect that.
But there are very few developments in the world that truly impinge on the vital security interests of both the United States and Europe as a whole.
And the idea that this is some kind of transatlantic solidarity that must be maintained to the end of time and puts us on the front lines of a confrontation with a nuclear armed Russia, to me, that is not only an unwise policy, it is an incredibly dangerous one.
And the NATO expansion advocates who've gotten their way almost without opposition now, they have led the United States down an extremely perilous path.
If we don't change that, if we do not back off from that policy and begin to adopt a very different policy, we were lucky to get through the Cold War without a major hot war involving the United States and the Soviet Union.
We very well may not be as lucky this time.
And the consequences, of course, would be catastrophic if we go up against a country that has several thousand nuclear warheads.
That is not anything to toy with at all.
And yet you have so many people in this country, in the media, in the foreign policy establishment, in Congress, and so on, that seem to think, oh, all we have to do is stand tall, be firm, and the Russians will just crawl away with their tail between their legs.
I think that is a horrifyingly dangerous illusion.
All right.
Now, so here's the thing, too.
Well, I don't know, too.
But here's the thing.
The media would have it that any concession that you guys would make, or any deal that you would make to try to, you know, back off of NATO expansion or whatever, lift any sanctions or enhance any, you know, corporate cooperation between Russian firms and American ones, or anything that you would do to get along better, recognize the annexation of Crimea, for example, or cease complaining about it in some half measure, or any of these kinds of things, all that would be obviously construed by the media as major wins for Putin.
But so I guess my question is, is maybe that's really right.
What all does America have to lose?
Maybe you think it's worth it.
But what does America have to lose from backing off other than arms sales for Lockheed Jets and that kind of thing?
Well, again, that's one of the big factors pushing the current policy.
And also, the United States political and policy leadership would have to accept a more modest, a reduced role in world affairs for the United States, that the United States is not going to, first of all, try to solve virtually everything.
Every problem and try to solve it by military means.
So we would adopt a much more circumspect policy.
And one that would recognize that whether we like it or not, the concept of spheres of influence still operates in the world.
That's why China is getting very agitated about the US attempt to maintain its primacy in the South China Sea and the rest of East Asia.
That's why Russia is getting agitated about US meddling in Eastern Europe.
And the sooner we recognize that that's the way world affairs operates, the sooner that we can have a much calmer, much more peaceful relationship with other major powers in the international system, especially Russia and China.
And if we don't do that, if we keep on intruding, getting in their face, in their core security zones, near their homelands, we're going to end up with very serious trouble.
The only question is when and just how the clash develops.
But it will develop.
One can't push countries the way the United States has been pushing Russia and expect to continue doing that indefinitely.
Well, you know, so I have my libertarian dream and you have yours, and we could be completely non-interventionist and all of these Ron Paulian things if that was our way.
But, you know, it's actually even Jean Kirkpatrick, who was a neoconservative and Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, when the Cold War ended, she said, well, now we can be a normal country in a normal time.
And looking back now, how naive that sounds, even coming from her, that really any government would refrain from usurping as much power as they possibly can.
You know, any country that has a chance to be the world empire, they take it.
What are the exceptions to that?
And in fact, there's this quote, and I forget, I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself, whether we've talked about this specific quote before on the show, but it's from Strobe Talbot.
Now, years later, I think this was from an interview last year in The New York Times, where I'm not going to read the whole thing, but he says, we do what we can in our own interest.
And what he says was that if we did anything less as the Bill Clinton government, if they did anything less than take absolutely full advantage of every situation for American power overall, however you measure it, then, as he says, they'd be run right out of office.
If they tried to say, look, we won the Cold War.
We're the hyper power, but we're not going to use it.
We're bringing all our troops home, all our Navy home, and we're just going to sit here and engage in market capitalism and be a limited republic with a Bill of Rights and all this stuff.
I mean, that's just crazy.
And look at what happened.
Not that, right?
What happened was George Bush Sr. took us to war.
We've been at war ever since.
And so, isn't he right, really, that they're going to push it because they don't know anything else to do except push it, even if it comes to H-bombs?
That, indeed, is a big part of the problem.
The members of the political and policy elite, first of all, I think misread, perhaps deliberately misread, the sentiment of the American people.
Most Americans are not in favor of running a global empire and constantly having the United States at risk of becoming involved in utterly obscure wars.
What support there is is usually very temporary and is ginned up in the midst of a supposed crisis.
And that's enough for the elite policymakers to push yet another military intervention somewhere.
The problem for those policymakers, though, is that, A, the policy doesn't work most of the time, and, B, the public support begins to evaporate when they realize that they've been misled, to be charitable about the term, and that things are not working out the way as intended.
So that support begins to sag and then nearly evaporate.
The problem is the public needs a better long-term memory that the next time that some crisis is ginned up and, oh, we have to go into country X to prevent some terrible thing from happening, that Americans go, wait a minute.
We've heard this before.
We've heard it here and here and here and here and here, and it always turns out differently.
And we're not going to buy that this time.
Until the American people reach that point, the political elite will go ahead and do just whatever it wants.
Only when it looks as though there's going to be a big political price to pay for pushing that kind of policy against the wishes of the American people, only then is there a chance that the policy is going to change in a fundamental way.
And you have the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about, his original formulation, the military-industrial-congressional complex, and that network of vested interests profits to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year doing what the country has been doing.
So they're not going to volunteer to scale back U.S. foreign policy, even though that change would definitely benefit the American people as a whole.
It won't benefit them, the vested interests.
Well, and the mainstream media, especially on TV, but the Post and the Times and all them, their point of view has never been more aligned with the CIA and with the military state as it is right now, as they rally around the state to protect them from the elected president.
Well, that is one of the more disturbing things.
You at least had some significant dissenters in the press before, but that has faded badly in recent years.
Part of that is simply blind Trump hatred that they will oppose anything that Donald Trump favors.
I wrote at one point that Donald Trump could come up with an enforceable agreement to abolish all nuclear weapons, something that the vast majority of Americans would support, and particularly people on the left would support.
And most of them would have the knee-jerk reaction to oppose the agreement because it was negotiated by Donald Trump.
You can see it with so-called anti-war leftists basically endorsing continuing the military quagmire missions in Afghanistan and Syria because Trump is the one who has proposed withdrawing American troops.
That is terrible blindness, but that's kind of the hyper-partisan divide that we have in this country right now.
Yeah, it really is amazing to see.
They hate him so much.
He can make them worse than him on the very worst thing, which you've got to give him credit for that, for driving them that crazy.
And you know what?
I'll stick up for the leftists.
I mean, not all of them, but pretty much the leftists, the real socialists and communists are good on this stuff.
It's the liberals who have no principle, who just support the Democrats and wave their flag and support all the wars and might as well be Republicans.
Well, keep in mind, even historically, most liberals since World War II have supported an interventionist foreign policy on a global basis.
They've just become a bit more vocal about it, a bit more open about it in recent years.
And we all remember what happened in 2005, right?
A lot of them were very much establishment liberals.
Yeah.
I mean, they used Cindy Sheehan and the anti-Iraq War II movement just long enough to get Pelosi and the Democrats their chair in 2006 in the midterm elections.
And then that was the end of that.
Nobody said a word about it again.
Ending the surge or anything.
Everybody, that was just it.
So, yeah, we know how they are.
But anyway, listen, at least we got you guys.
And I mean that.
I mean, I don't know really where we would be without you and Doug Bandow and John Glaser and all the great people at the Cato Institute Foreign Policy Department over there, holding down all these great articles day in, day out at all these great venues too.
So, I really appreciate you coming on the show to talk about this stuff with us.
My pleasure.
Thanks again, Ted.
Sure.
All right, you guys.
Ted Carpenter at Cato.org, at TheAmericanConservative.com, and at The National Interest.
And this one is at TAC.
NATO partisans started a new Cold War with Russia, complete with great extended quotations from Robert Gates memoirs about how, yeah, actually it is all America's fault, of course.
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We look forward to seeing you in there.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
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