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, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, 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.
All right, you guys, introducing James Carden.
He is a contributing writer at The Nation, an executive editor for the American Committee for East-West Accord.
And here he is at The Nation with this brand new article, this great article we ran on antiwar.com the other day or last week or something.
NATO turns 70.
Next week, Washington will throw the Military Alliance a birthday party.
How much is there to celebrate?
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, James?
I'm good.
Good to be back.
Very happy to talk to you again.
And you know what?
I really owe you thanks because every morning, along with my Mondo Weiss and my other great email lists that I get, Future Freedom Foundation, I get the morning email from the Committee for East-West Accord.
And every day you have the most interesting stuff about, of course, Russiagate, but also everything about Russia that's important in the new Cold War era and everything.
And I just love it.
And that's why I'm so smart, actually, is because of the things you email me every day, sir.
So thank you.
I doubt that very much, but thank you very, very much.
That's very kind of you.
Very kind of you to say.
Russia is still going, still going strong.
And I'm hoping that with the end of the Russiagate Mueller madness, that we might be able to step up our efforts and get our message out without being, you know, targeted and smeared as Putin puppets and the like.
But we'll see.
Perhaps that's too much to hope for.
We'll just bite at them and just say, no, see, you're the useless idiots of the CIA and that's your problem.
And here's the reality.
And just hit them with it because the narrative is so strong the other way that, oh, Russia, Russia, Russia is behind everything.
And anyone who disagrees with the CIA only does so because the Russians either tricked them into it or bribed them into it.
And this kind of thing.
The only way to fight that is with uppercuts, I'm afraid.
But then again, you know, Mueller just scored a first big blow for us in deflating this whole myth that, you know, Trump worked with the Russians to do this secret plot to overthrow the American democracy and all this garbage they've been pushing.
Well, yeah, my fear is, though, that they are going to really, really hang on to this, you know.
And I think we're already seeing that with their approach now, you know, bars covering up something, you know, and, you know, if there are any redactions, which I think there have to be for legal reasons because some of the cases are ongoing.
Any sort of redaction is going to result in a kind of hysterical reaction, kind of grand cover up.
And Trump is still guilty and it's all, my favorite is Marcy Wheeler, Empty Wheel.
And, you know, she's been saying for months, you know, it's all hiding in plain sight, evidence of collusion.
It doesn't matter what Mueller has to say.
So I think that's going to be the new talking point.
I hope I'm wrong.
Oh, yeah.
There it is, this ridiculous Trump Tower meeting.
There it is, this guy, Misfud, who met with Papadopoulos.
All these things that have already fallen to the side as not evidence.
They all still count anyway.
One of the odder things that's happened is that I happen to think that Papadopoulos is kind of emerging as one of the more sympathetic characters in this whole ordeal.
I mean, this guy, you know, he volunteered for the Trump campaign.
And then at least, you know, if he can be believed in his memoir, one after another of people who were ostensibly working for the U.S. government were trying to entrap this kid.
It's just saying that he was, you know, an agent of Russia.
It's really wild.
Yeah, I got Daniel Lazarus coming on the show later on about that.
Oh, he did a great review and consortium.
Yeah.
Daniel's great.
Yeah.
Anyway, so here's the deal, though.
Let's talk about the actual story, right, instead of the non-story.
The actual story is, of course, blame America first.
Everything is the U.S. government's fault, and that goes for every social problem in this country.
For that matter, every problem of our marketplace, every problem everywhere in the world is because of America, even starving Somalis.
That's because of the USA.
That's what it means to be the benevolent global hegemon.
And it ain't the Soviet Union that moved west after America lost the Cold War.
It's the other way around, huh?
Well, that's right.
And that's one of the things that gets lost in the narrative, particularly the 70th anniversary of NATO narrative.
It was sort of a poor policy choice.
It wasn't inevitable that NATO would expand to Russia's border and move the epicenter of division of Europe from Berlin to now where it is, probably Kiev.
It was a policy choice made by the Clinton administration, and they had ample warning by very distinguished people, including George F. Kennedy, that the Russians were not going to react very well to this.
And that's exactly what happened.
So instead of, I think, making the countries who have since joined NATO more secure, it's actually been counterproductive.
I think it's actually made them less secure.
I think Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania would have been much better off if they had negotiated bilateral defense arrangements with the Russian Federation.
But they didn't, and I can't imagine that they are any better off under NATO than they would have been with that arrangement.
Because does anyone really believe that we would trade off, say, Chicago for Riga?
No, of course not.
I mean, that was obvious in the 1960s.
Well, I mean, this is a major point right here.
Let's stop right here with this, because the idea was, I guess, even during the Cold War, there was a question of whether we really give up London and New York and Chicago for Berlin.
But the statement was, you're damn right we will, and you better not try it, you stinking Reds.
But then at that time, the line was a thousand miles to the west of where it is now.
Exactly right.
So the situation is actually even more fraught.
Yeah, I mean, that's a lot more capital.
But so, I mean, when one of these countries joins NATO, or when these countries joined NATO, the deal is they're joining our military lines.
Article 5 says somebody attacks you, then we'll attack them.
I know the language is a little vague.
There's some wiggle room in there.
But essentially, that's what everybody thinks the deal is.
That's the whole point of joining NATO, is no one will ever mess with you, because then they know that they're messing with the United States if they do.
But you're telling me, and I've read, you know, Pat Buchanan and other critics in the past say, come on.
When it really comes down to it, if it ever does, say, two Russian presidents from now, then they decide they're going to invade the Baltic states.
There's no way America is going to go to war for them.
It would be absolutely insane for them to do it.
And so, that kind of raises the question of what's even really the point in the first place?
Because if the Americans really would not come to the aid of these Eastern European countries, then the Russians have to know that.
And so, what's even the purpose of bringing them in at all, other than just more welfare dollars for Lockheed?
Well, one of the things, one of the fig leaves that they've used is that NATO also has been a force of stability and democratic values in the new Eastern, the post-Soviet Eastern Europe.
And they kind of equate the European Union with NATO, saying that these two institutions really were successful in transitioning these countries into stable, free, democratic, capitalist states.
And I just find the argument odd that they seem to think that a military alliance is some kind of embodiment of democratic values.
It makes very little sense to me.
Of course.
I mean, this is the whole hypocrisy of the thing, is we don't have Ron Paulianism.
We have Thomas Friedmanism, where you can't have free trade without the mailed fist of the American empire to enforce it all.
Well, that's not exactly synonymous with free markets and democracy like in the slogan.
If we're really selling people self-government and free markets, then none of this is compatible with that at all.
It's the exact opposite.
Yeah, that's right.
And I think it was Friedman, who probably has to be the dumbest foreign affairs commentator this side of Christiane Amanpour, who made the argument that no two countries with McDonald's will ever go to war with one another.
I mean, it's just, you know, it's a ludicrous argument.
Yeah, and it was just a way of saying any country that's a satellite of the United States, that's under America's military umbrella.
They have no reason to fight because they're dominated by the U.S. But, you know, it's interesting here, though.
And as we talked about before, you just mentioned George Kennan.
Friedman actually got this one point right about the NATO expansion.
And he was the one who wrote and now a word from X in The New York Times in 1998.
And I think agreeing with George Kennan, too, in his own words.
It did seem that way.
That this is really crazy to do.
It's such a sad state of affairs now, 20 years later.
I mean, you wonder, could someone like George Kennan penetrate the op-ed page in The New York Times at this point?
It's an open question.
Our media is so dominated by the neoconservative slash liberal interventionist orthodoxy that there's very little room for dissenting opinion, particularly on NATO.
I mean, we just had, as I mentioned, the 70th anniversary of NATO in Washington.
It was a big event.
But scanning the major newspapers, I didn't see any pieces criticizing the policy of expansion.
They read that the pieces that were published read like press releases.
So it's really kind of, this groupthink is really kind of worrying.
And that's what makes programs like your own very valuable, because it gives dissidents a chance to air our views.
Yeah, I mean, the groupthink up there is just so—there's too many different adjectives.
It's a big negative.
It's really too bad.
It essentially is cowardice, right?
They're just afraid to debate any of this stuff.
I mean, you have especially like The Nation magazine, for example, where you're writing here.
The Nation is perfectly mainstream and legit.
The Nation is one click to the left of center, not three or four, right?
This is not Marxist bomb throwing.
This is The Nation magazine, for God's sake.
And so if you have yourself or—I'm sorry, Cohen.
What's his first name?
Stephen Cohen, there.
He's way too hoity-toity to do my show.
But anyway, you have a guy like that, he ought to be on CNN.
He ought to be on MSNBC or whatever.
And they ought to have the courage to say that they're so smart and they know that they're so right that they're not afraid to mix it up with a guy like him or a guy like you.
But instead, no.
Not even on a show like Chris Hayes, where he used to be the Washington editor of The Nation.
There's a guy who's not just a TV star, but actually used to do writing and stuff.
Right, right.
Hayes' transformation is really kind of puzzling to a couple of people who knew him.
Nah, there ain't no puzzle to it.
He's rich now.
Right, right, right.
The key to solving the puzzle is careerism, I think.
And that explains a lot.
That explains a lot of the behavior, particularly during this era of Russiagate and Mueller madness.
A lot of media stars were created, people who were simply marginal figures who have become overnight media sensations.
Look at someone like Malcolm Nance, who was really basically a very low-level army, I think, IT guy, is now very famous.
He's made very famous because of his appearances on MSNBC.
He's not really an intelligence operative or specialist.
I think he was probably just fixing the computers.
And you have people like Natasha Bertrand, who seems to be about 19 years old.
And she's now national correspondent of The Atlantic and on MSNBC all the time.
These people have little to no qualifications whatsoever.
But because they embrace the narrative, they are doing very, very well.
So that's the way it works.
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Hey, let's talk about that time that the singers James Blunt and Michael Jackson stopped World War III.
Oh wait, different Michael Jackson.
But yes, James Blunt, who I actually don't know who that is, but I read somewhere that he was a famous singer.
They really did almost get us nuked back in 1999, huh?
Well, it was General Jackson who basically ignored, refused to follow the orders of American General Wesley Clark in Kosovo.
So that was, I think, NATO's second major post-Cold War operation in 1999.
And what happened was that the Russians objected to the NATO operation.
The NATO operation in Kosovo went on in the absence of authorization from the United Nations.
And at some point, the Russians had landed at the airport in Kosovo to deliver aid to the Serbians who had been bombed for 77, 78 days by NATO.
And Clark ordered Jackson to retake the airfield from the Russians by force if necessary.
And Jackson said, forget it.
I'm not going to start the Third World War for you.
And so that is a pretty stark reminder and example of the danger that comes along with this alliance.
We could very well have set off a Third World War, according to this British general, in 1999 in order to carry out a NATO mission.
And the NATO mission in Kosovo, I mean, let's face it, let's not mince words, was two years before 9-11.
And the point was to carve out a Muslim enclave in the middle of Europe.
Well, I'm not so sure that that was a very strategically sound thing to do.
Well, and it was based on absolute lies.
Mass graves full of hundreds of thousands, at least 100,000 innocent Albanian Muslim civilians slaughtered by the Serbs, Bill Clinton said.
And they were right there next to Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program and warehouses full of VX, too.
And the babies in the incubators.
Yeah, on the way to the Gulf of Tonkin.
Right, right, right.
So, yeah, the dangers inherent in having this alliance, particularly in its current iteration, now that it's smacked up against Russia's western border, are immense.
But totally ignored by the American political media class.
Yep.
And, you know, the KLA there in that war, they are directly tied to the Bin Ladenites, who had already been attacking U.S. interests for years at that point.
Oh, for sure.
And they also have a healthy side business in organ trafficking.
Yeah.
No big deal.
No big deal.
Wait, those are our guys doing that, so it's cool.
We always find a way to align ourselves with the very worst of the worst.
I mean, look at what happened in Ukraine.
Look at what happened in Syria most recently.
We are on the side of neo-Nazi skinheads in Ukraine, and we are on the side, militarily, with the worst, most violent source of jihadists who are trying to overthrow a secular, yes, brutal, but secular police state.
And, you know, if you venture that opinion in polite society, what are you going to face?
Well, I'll tell you what you're going to face.
You're going to face something like what Max Blumenthal just faced in Washington, where Max has a new book out, and it covers the American operation and the folly of its policy in Syria.
And what happened was Politics and Pros was going to host him.
They posted him three previous times.
This was the big debut event, too, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And a Twitter mob went crazy, and they scared the co-owners of Politics and Pros, and they postponed the event.
And I spoke to the co-owner of Politics and Pros about this, a former journalist by the name of Bradley Graham, who wrote a pretty good book about Rumsfeld.
And, you know, you could tell that the guy was just befuddled.
He didn't know what hit him.
And it's the vehemence of these people who are acting, in effect, as pro-jihadi mouthpieces, mouthpieces for al-Nusra, mouthpieces for al-Qaeda, who, and many of them are foreigners.
And look, Max Blumenthal, and he's going to be on the show later.
I read his book yesterday.
It's excellent.
Yeah, he's great.
The Management of Savagery, taken from the ISIS tract, or the al-Qaeda tract.
But he's a known quantity, right?
If you're the guy from Politics and Pros, you know that he wrote The 51 Day War and Goliath, and you know he's Sid Blumenthal's son.
And how controversial is he?
You know what I mean?
Even if he's against the standard line on Syria, it's not like you don't know who he is or where he's from, and maybe he's some white supremacist or whatever controversial thing that could legitimately get you uninvited from an event like that.
They already know better.
They have to know better.
That was my assumption when that happened, but I swear to you, after I spoke with Bradley Graham on the phone for 20 minutes trying to figure out what the deal was, he struck me as genuinely clueless.
And I was quite surprised by that because of his previous career, but perhaps that is a qualification and characteristic of someone who made his career at the Washington Post.
But they were really legitimately, I think, scared of some of the things that were coming across the Twittersphere from these moderate rebels.
Yeah, exactly.
So we've got to talk about Afghanistan real quick here, too, because a huge part of the Afghan war is a team-building exercise for NATO.
It's a project that they started, so they can't quit it, and here we are 20 years in.
Well, that's exactly right.
And how absurd is that, a team-building exercise?
I mean, this is a country we've been at war in for 20 years.
It should have certainly have been ramped up the very moment the bullets crashed through Osama bin Laden.
But again, these things have a sort of kinetic energy, and they just keep going and going and going.
Hey, let me ask you this.
Are you being naive about Russia?
Maybe Vladimir Putin is Joseph Stalin, and you are his useful communist dupe, and he's going to take over the whole world if we don't stop him, huh?
Well, I mean, I've been called worse.
I find it very difficult to believe my ears when I hear people make those comparisons between Putin and Stalin.
Only about six months ago, maybe last year, Putin presided over the opening of a memorial museum to the victims of the Gulag.
Putin is certainly – he's not even a communist.
He's not even a socialist.
Putin, his economics strike me as perfectly neoliberal.
I don't think that he would be out of place in Davos, really.
So that's another – his Dr. Evil reputation has been manufactured by people who basically got rich off the old system in the 90s who are pretty sinister oligarchs themselves, but who he chased out of the country.
And then they came here, linked up with the neoconservatives, and have embarked on a campaign to turn this guy into Stalin when really he's, I think, a nationalist, a technocrat, a neoliberal, but certainly not Stalin and certainly not Hitler, which is what Hillary Clinton – which is who Hillary Clinton compared him to.
And this campaign has really been funded by people like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the disgraced former American oligarch William Browder.
And so again, this is a very interesting example of foreign influence in the United States.
When people go on and on about Russia's influence in the 2016 election, you kind of got to laugh because it's nothing compared to the foreign influence of, A, people who we were just talking about vis-a-vis Max Blumenthal, and B, these other foreigners like Browder and Khodorkovsky.
And C, of course, we have the Israeli Gulf state access as well.
So Russia has virtually no soft power slash lobbying influence in Washington.
Well, of course they don't if you go comparing them to other countries that do.
Sure.
Darn it.
Listen though, and speaking of Blumenthal, he's always been great on the coup in Ukraine in 2014.
You mentioned earlier the importance of Ukraine in all of this.
Two coups in 10 years, and the second one then leading to the Russian seizure of the Crimean Peninsula there.
And I just wanted to point out a couple of things about that.
First of all, if you had to have a group of people switch sovereignties from one nation state to the other without going through some world court process or what have you, this is about as clean of a change as you could get.
Where it's something like 90% of the population of Crimea are Russian ethnically and linguistically and traditionally and all that.
Where the Crimean Peninsula never really belonged to Ukraine until the general secretary of the Communist Party gifted it to them in the 1950s when it didn't matter because they were all answerable only to the Kremlin.
And then when this whole crisis broke out, and as you said, three or four different former Ukrainian presidents all signed this open letter saying now's our chance to kick the Russians out of the Sevastopol Naval Base.
And they left that base and seized the peninsula.
No one was killed.
No one.
And I saw the video of the only shots fired, two or three shots fired in the air, and some Russian soldiers throwing some Ukrainian ones.
You boys better turn around.
And then that was it.
And so it ain't perfect and it ain't the law, and yet it's a perfect reaction to almost a symmetrical kind of a thing to what America had done in Kiev.
And then just one last point on this real quick before I turn that over to you, which is that Andrew Coburn had a piece in Harper's, and we talked about it on the show that day, about how he had a source at a big Pentagon party in Crystal City.
There were all the military contractors, you know, companies are there in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
And that when they heard about the seizure of the Crimean Peninsula by the Russians, they all whooped it up and started celebrating and laughing and drinking more and faster and having a good time because to them, this was the beginning of the first day of the rest of their business life, selling weapons to the Pentagon for ever inflated prices.
And, you know, never let a good crisis go to waste, as Connelisa Rice and Rahm Emanuel would say.
Yeah, exactly right.
That was seen by companies like Lockheed and Raytheon and Boeing to be the start of something really beautiful.
And in a sense, they were right.
The new Cold War is simply a gift, is a gift to these types.
And, you know, you mentioned the coups in Ukraine and the like, you know, an election is coming up.
There's a runoff presidential election in Ukraine between a television comedian and the sitting president.
And the comedian is leading by quite a lot.
They say he's a pretty typical, you know, American stooge type, too, though.
What do you think?
That's probably true.
Do we have any audio of Robert Kagan's wife discussing his future role in politics there?
Well, it's interesting you bring up Victoria Nuland, because when she was in office as the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, she testified before Congress saying that the Russians were conducting a reign of terror on the Crimean Peninsula, which was laughable then and it's laughable now.
But it just goes to show you the length to which these people will simply flat out lie in order to promote their agenda.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I know we're both running late and got to go, but thank you so much for coming on the show and for being so good on this issue.
Really do appreciate it, James.
It's great being back on.
All right, you guys.
That is James Carden.
He is at The Nation.
This article is it's really great.
We barely scratched the surface of this article.
Please go check it out at The Nation.
NATO turned 70.
And then also check out the Committee for East-West Accord.
Happens to be kind of the most important thing in the world.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
