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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, man, 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 Michael T. Clare.
He writes regularly for Tom Dispatch.
He's a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, and he's the author most recently of The Race for What's Left.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
How are you doing?
Great.
Glad to talk with you again.
Yeah, yeah.
Very happy to have you here.
I always love reading what you write, and this one is a couple weeks old now.
It's from the 3rd of April from TomDispatch.com originally, the new long war, or could the cold war return with a vengeance?
And I keep thinking, you know, in the back of my mind, not that it would be worth it, but I keep thinking maybe as long as America's bogged down killing Afghans and Yemenis and Iraqis and Syrians, maybe that's preventing the worst of the hawks in the Pentagon from picking a species-destroying fight with Russia.
And so I wouldn't presume to sacrifice the lives of the Pashtuns for that or whatever necessarily, but I'm just saying I kind of worry about what if I'm successful and I end up helping get us all, you know, in stopping the terror wars in the Middle East and I end up just helping get all of humanity killed.
Michael, what do you think?
This is sort of the nightmare scenarios we have to play out and compare one against the other.
Unfortunately, it's not either or, it's both.
At least I think that's the way the Pentagon sees it.
They want everything.
They're not going to shut down the war on terror.
They're not going to shut down the war in Afghanistan.
They're just going to leave it to certain units, the special forces, you know, the special units that fight counter-terror operations.
But, you know, the bulk of the U.S. military is designed to fight big wars, tank wars, carrier wars, major air wars, and they're itching for an opportunity to show their stuff.
And also they want to buy new weapons for that purpose.
And so they're drumming, you know, they're pounding the drums trying to get us revved up for this new long war against Russia and China.
Right.
Okay.
Now, so it's just another Cold War though, right?
Because at the end of the day, mutually assured destruction, you can't really fight Russia without losing Washington, D.C.
And Lord knows D.C. would sacrifice all the rest of us, but they're not going to sacrifice themselves.
Okay.
Well, I think there are two things that make this new Cold War environment different from the last one.
The first is that China is also a factor, and China has its own nuclear arsenal, much smaller than the Russian ones, to be sure.
But you have an independent actor here, China, that has its own geopolitical ambitions that could produce a clash with the United States.
And that part of the new Cold War is heating up as fast as the Russian part.
So that's one thing that's different.
The second thing that's different, I think, is that the battlefields are more fluid.
Back in the Cold War day, there was a very clear demarcation, the iron curtain, where the forces were lined up on one side and on the other side, and everybody was very clear.
You didn't cross that line without starting a chain of events that would lead, as you said, to nuking Washington and Moscow and the rest.
So people were very clear, very determined to stay on their side of the line most of the time.
Now we have a much more fluid situation with Russian and American planes and ships mixing it up in the Baltic Sea, in the Black Sea, in Scandinavia, and we have American and Chinese ships mixing it up in the South China Sea, which means there's a much greater potential for things to go wrong, for an accident, a miscalculation.
Well, you know, Pat Buchanan has made this point, he always puts things so succinctly, where he says, listen, it used to be the line in the sand under, you know, from Truman all the way through Ronald Reagan, and even into George H.W. Bush, was if the Soviets cross into Western Germany, the Western half of Germany, we will go to nuclear war.
You can crush an uprising, even if we provoke it in Hungary or in Czechoslovakia.
You can crush solidarity in Poland.
You know what?
That's your sphere of influence, not ours.
That's tough.
We're not going to do anything about it.
But you better stay out of West Germany.
And yet now we've moved that line from the Elbe River, all the way literally to Russia's border with the Baltics.
And they keep talking about bringing Ukraine even into NATO.
And so where we used to have basically this geographical margin of error, where possibly a Berlin crisis could not lead to a war in some circumstances or something like this.
If things get too heated up in Eastern Europe, we're right there.
And the literal geographic buffer doesn't exist.
In fact, Moscow is really, what, just a couple of two, three hundred miles from the border.
Yes.
And not only Moscow, Moscow's three or four or five hundred miles.
But St. Petersburg, their number two city, is a much shorter distance from the Baltic republics and NATO forces.
And the Russians are very freaked out about this.
There's also a slice of Russia known as Kaliningrad.
I only learned this in the past year or so.
It's not something we learn about very often.
Kaliningrad, it's Russian territory that is squeezed between Poland and Lithuania.
And it has become a total Russian fortress.
It's also where their naval base, their Baltic fleet is located.
And they've stuffed it with ballistic missiles that could fire anywhere in Europe.
So they have a base within our sphere.
Meanwhile, we're sending American troops into Poland and the Baltic states.
So it's totally mixed up.
We don't have that geographic certainty that you described a few minutes ago, that we could be clear who's where.
That's gone now.
Yeah.
Well, you know, here's the thing that's most troublesome, I guess, right, is the unreality of all this.
You know, I've heard my whole life about, well, they really believed in the domino theory.
And that always just kind of seemed like an excuse for Vietnam and this kind of thing.
Because the CIA, I guess we know now, had debunked the domino theory in the late 50s for something already, right?
Early 60s or something.
But anyway, I mean, I guess they really had talked themselves into this, sort of like, well, we're going to support the moderate rebels, even though everybody knew that it was al-Qaeda in Iraq were the moderate rebels in Syria from the beginning.
But once they had decided that in D.C., that's just their thing or this kind of deal.
But so, you know, ultimately, to less consequence for, you know, the fate of all humanity, when we're talking about America's relationship with Russia, we're talking about the prospect of omnicide, the new term coined by Daniel Ellsberg to decide to describe the extinction of our species, or very near it in the event of a full scale war between us and Russia.
And yet, it's only in alternative media like antiwar.com, and tomdispatch.com, and, you know, a few other places.
Occasionally, the truth creeps in at the national interest.
But for the most part, it seems that the entire consensus in D.C. is everybody knows that history began yesterday and everything in the world is Russia's fault.
Even the 2016 election nonsense, notwithstanding.
That they, in D.C., it doesn't seem, Michael, like they broke any discussion of America's role in escalating these tensions, expanding NATO, doing regime changes in Ukraine, and, you know, trying one in Syria and all this stuff that's provoked Russia into reacting.
They just act like, and they say it, right?
It's the return of the Russian empire, Putin.
You know, if they're not comparing him to Stalin, they're comparing him to one of the old Russian czars and saying he wants to reconquer Eastern Europe.
And I just wonder, like, I mean, am I really right about that?
That there are no Michael Clare points of view being pushed in D.C. anywhere, really, to say, come on, guys, this isn't really right, you know?
I think that's a pretty fair consensus that the Washington establishment never got over the Cold War.
But you have to remember that the foreign policy leadership in Washington earned their spurs, got their promotions, rose to power and influence during the Cold War by each of them being more anti-Russian or anti-Soviet in those days than the next guy.
So their whole mindset is how to make war on Russia.
When the Cold War ended, they were a little bit adrift.
And, you know, the new thing became counterterrorism, and those folks sort of lost their moorings a bit, but they never gave up their basic outlook.
And they're fighting to make a comeback, the Washington elites.
They want to restore the world to where they were comfortable, where the Cold War was the dominating mindset that governed everything and put them in positions of power, of course.
And I think we're seeing that very much so in Washington.
And it's very clearly a bipartisan stimulus.
This is not Republicans versus Democrats.
This is very much a bipartisan impulse to go back to a united front against Russia and increasingly China, always had China into this equation.
Yeah, and you know, even where Obama had overthrown the government in Ukraine in 2014, he still backed down on arming the government there.
And, you know, here Trump's instinct was, hey, well, let's get along with Russia and this kind of thing.
And as Sheldon Richman was pointing out to me the other day, I forgot, I think it was a Wall Street Journal piece or something that said that the deciding factor for Trump to arm the Ukrainian coup junta there, which, you know, has been at violent war with these autonomous zones in the East, was that somebody told him, well, this will make money for American companies because he believes in this military Keynesianism that this is, he doesn't even, you know, he just thinks this is the natural state of things, right, is American weapons sales.
That's what it's all about.
That's what our economy's built on.
It ain't a shame.
It's supposed to be that way, he thinks.
And so even if it comes to arming the Ukrainians, as long as he's making Lockheed happy, or in his imagination, he's causing full employment out there somewhere, they can get him to do anything.
Yeah, you just reminded me there is that added dimension to all of this.
So coming back to where we started, this is why I'm so worried today, because there are all these flashpoints in the world, Ukraine being, you know, on the top of the list, along with the Baltics, places where something small, some small incident could erupt very rapidly into something much bigger.
And what worries me too, is that we don't have the kind of leadership on any side, the Russian side, the Chinese side, or the American side, of the kind of leaders we had in the past, who might say, wait a minute, wait a minute, let's not let this thing get out of hand, let's get on the hotline or something.
Like in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when President Kennedy, you know, had the foresight, the guts to put a stop to the escalatory pattern.
I worry that we don't have that kind of leadership today, so that an incident in the Baltics or in Ukraine, or in the South China Sea, could erupt very quickly into something much bigger.
And before we know it, they're flinging nuclear weapons at each other.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, didn't it sound like on a piece of paper somewhere, it says, well, if this happens, then we do this.
If this happens, we do this.
But instead of those things being, you know, possibilities and frames of reference, but it ends up being kind of carved in stone that, okay, if somebody shoots somebody in the Black Sea, what's going to happen?
And then, you know, it's basically, you know, some deputy committee study report, or some kind of thing ends up being the policy, whether it's, you know, really, truly the wise thing to do or not, just kind of runs on automatic pilot or something.
Not quite like that, but something along those lines, to be sure.
The place I worry a lot about, Scott, is the South China Sea.
Because, and here's a case where both sides are behaving, in my mind, in a very haphazard and perilous way.
The Chinese are building up these islands and putting weapons on the islands.
And that's a provocative move.
And now, the Pacific Command, the U.S. Pacific Command, wants to challenge that by building up our capacities, sending more ships there, more planes, more missiles.
And sooner or later, one side or the other, some cocky 21-year-old Chinese or American is going to overreact and fire off a missile or something.
And like you say, somewhere, there's a piece of paper or a computer program that says what you do when that happens.
You fire off 10 missiles in response.
And you know what I mean, one thing leads to another.
Right.
Yeah.
And I mean, that's the deal, too, is you like to imagine that Colonel Potter is out there somewhere, being very sober and responsible and making a smart decision about what to do.
But that's where, that's why I bring up the piece of paper, because it seems like in a crisis, really, everybody would rather defer responsibility and just go with what the thing says, rather than, you know, take the, take it as their own mandate to say, hold your horses here, or, or go ahead or whatever it is, but making it their own decision instead, you know?
Yeah, well, this is why we need to work out the confliction.
This is hard word to pronounce.
De-conflictuization.
Maybe you could pronounce it better than me.
Strategy.
No way.
They've, they have attempted that in Syria.
And I give credit to the American and Russian officers on the ground, who are trying to avoid their planes from coming into, to collision with one another.
I mean, at the very least, that's the sort of thing we have to work on.
We have to do the same thing in the Baltics and the South China Sea.
That's our best hope, is that wise heads in the military, or elsewhere, find ways to stop this process of escalation before it gets out of hand.
Yeah.
You know, there's this great clip, Ray McGovern highlighted this.
It's from some interview of Vladimir Putin, where, oh, I know what it is.
It's, is Jack Matlock, the second to the last ambassador to the Soviet Union, said to Vladimir Putin, hey, listen, you know that missile defense is just a welfare program, basically, for these big multinational, or, you know, these military industrial complex firms.
That it's just, you know, it's a cash cow.
We're not really threatening Russia.
We're not building up a first strike capability to attack you with, or something.
It's just, you know, corruption, American style.
And Putin says something very close to, yeah, of course.
I mean, everybody knows that.
And yet at the same time, look at the position you're putting me in.
I can't ignore this and just pretend like it's nothing but that, when actually, you know, if you really can achieve the ability to shoot down my missiles, that puts you at a huge strategic advantage over Russia.
And I can't allow that to happen.
So what do you expect me to do?
And that was when, you know, and they came out with these, you know, new missiles, the one that comes from the South and these supersonic cruise missiles and all of this stuff, nuclear powered, unlimited range cruise missile that they claim they have now and all this stuff.
Because, you know, what are you going to do?
And the thing is, is that's almost the perfect frame of reference for it, right?
Like, you know, maybe somewhere there's some kooks in the Pentagon who really want a first strike capability, but mostly it really is just a welfare program for general dynamics and all that.
And yet, it's, you know, speaking of kind of autopilot, and it says so on the piece of paper and no policy that makes any real sense for the national security.
I mean, this is it.
This is insane that we've, the US has provoked Russia.
I actually think it's, what you have is a coalition in Washington between what you described, the military industrial complex, they just want more money for new, for endless allocations, appropriations for new systems.
They don't care what they are, as long as they're expensive and last for years and years.
So you have that machine grinding away, grinding away on one hand.
And then you have this, like I was saying earlier, this instinctive anti-Russian feeling.
That's sentiment that's been deeply ensconced in Washington is now fully unleashed, and is looking for every opportunity to push back against the Russians.
And so these two forces are combining, and there's nothing stopping in their way.
Absolutely nothing.
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Well, more about China in a second, but at least in Europe, we have the Germans who have fought the Russians before and don't want to do that again now, right?
They're the saucer that cools the boiling tea, hopefully.
Well, we could certainly hope that's the case, but I'm not so confident.
Well, maybe in Germany, but look at the elections happening all over Europe.
There's a strong, growing anti-EU spirit there.
And in Italy, in the last elections, the forces, the Five Star Movement and the League, the group that won the dominant number of seats in the Italian parliament, they want to lift sanctions on Russia.
They're pals with Putin.
So who knows where things are going to go in Europe?
No, I'm for all that.
I mean, right-wing reaction can go too far.
But if it comes to dissolving the EU and all of these countries refusing to be America's sock puppets in this Cold War, then great.
I think that's an interesting topic for conversation, Scott.
The pros and cons of all of this.
Yeah, I mean, well, the real problem, right, is that wherever the EU goes, NATO goes with it.
And so it's not just, you know, an economic community and railroads without passports, but it's America's military alliance and military empire comes with it and creates all this tension and danger.
Well, I certainly agree that NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe up to the borders of Russia, which began several administrations ago, and was continued under the Obama administration was a terrible mistake.
That's really the origins of the problem we're in today.
So I'm with you there 100%.
Yeah, Trump even brought Montenegro in.
I mean, they started the process before him, but he went ahead with that.
Yeah, but this began under the bushes, and was continued by every president since to expand NATO up to the borders of Russia, you know, including taking going on territory of the former Soviet Union.
This is bound to rile up everyone in Russia.
And so when Putin objects to that, he has the overwhelming support of his population.
Yeah, you know, James Carden said on the show that Strobe Talbot in his memoirs admits, I guess he's boasting about this, that when George Kennan warned against NATO expansion in the Clinton years, that Bill Clinton said to Strobe Talbot, hey, I thought Kennan was your mentor.
And he's saying we shouldn't be doing this.
And Talbot said, Oh, no, don't worry.
You know, he always just hated NATO anyway, and dismissed Kennan's concerns when Kennan was saying exactly this, that we're going to create this terrible reaction by the Russians.
And in fact, he elaborated and said, and then when the Russians do react, then you're going to say, well, this is why we have to do it is to protect against Russian aggression, which is exactly what Strobe Talbot did and is now one of the leaders of the Russia hawks.
The same guy.
Yeah, Bill Taubman, who's just published this definitive biography of Gorbachev.
And he says that Gorbachev was firmly under the belief that the United States had promised that there would be no expansion of NATO into the space of the former Soviet Union, that he was totally in the belief of that, and that that was part of the understanding by which then the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw from Germany and allowing Germany to reunite under the West.
And so from a Russian, the Russians truly believe this, and Gorbachev believed this.
And so there clearly was some betrayal there.
And the Russians take from that a powerful sense of grievance and resentment.
And this is what powers, fuels Putin's anti-Western fury.
Yeah, well, in fact, you know, we know from talking with Jack Matlock on the show, and from Ray McGovern, who was at the CIA then, but it's now just since last December 2017, George Washington University's National Security Project, they got the declassified records that prove in writing that they had promised this to the Russians, that they would not expand one inch to the east, is what they've been told.
And so I guess when we look back from the future about the origins of this new Cold War that I wrote about, I think this is where you have to start with this betrayal of these promises that were made.
All right, well, this is pretty thin gruel, Michael, but what about Putin's a very, very bad guy?
That's what we always hear.
Yeah, well, I did once get to see Mr. Putin in person at a conference, and he could be very charming, but you have a sense that this is a very dangerous man, somebody who's capable of taking very drastic actions that wind up with people being dead.
That was my impression of him, and I think that's the case.
But I also think that because of our behavior, Americans' behavior, he has the support of the Russian public, and that's what's so unfortunate.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, I think it's actually, I don't know, maybe I'm just a sucker, but I don't think so.
It seems like he sort of had bent over backwards to try to get along with America and saw it in Russia's strategic interest, not to get over on us, but to try to get along.
And he tried to help George Bush and Obama with the terror war in Afghanistan.
And he cut a deal with Obama to save him from backing himself into a corner on the war in Syria in 2013, and worked with Obama on helping convince the Iranians to do the JCPOA.
And you know what I mean?
He may be a psychopath, dangerous, scary head of state.
I'm not a fan of heads of state very much.
But it seems like in the scheme of things, Russia's interest in America is actually aligned quite a bit.
I mean, even assuming the prerogatives of the American empire, never mind the American people's, you know, wanting peace and freedom.
I think ultimately, you're absolutely right about that.
That is to say, more than anything else, Russia and the United States have a common interest in preserving world peace and stability.
Let's start from there.
And we also have an interest in the stability of Europe, and the stability of the Middle East, and preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Those are a lot of things on which we share common ground.
I think that Mr. Putin, just as Donald Trump says that his job is to put America first, we could argue about whether he has a clear conception of what that means.
You know, I think that's a legitimate expression of the president's job.
We could argue about that.
The point is that Mr. Putin thinks that his job is to make Russia great.
And, you know, that is his job.
And there are places where those two, make America great, make Russia great, there are places where there are differences, where there are conflicts of interest.
And that's where we have to look about how we could resolve those conflicts of interest in a peaceful manner.
That's really the major priority we have at this time in history.
So we look at one of those clashes of interest.
Ukraine is one, Syria is another.
I believe it is possible to find a peaceful resolution.
But we can't ignore that there are contending interests in these various spheres, when you have two powerful countries, each asserting their national interests in a conflictive way.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny with the NATO expansion.
I mean, on one hand, it seems like we can never kick the Eastern European countries out of it.
It would have to, NATO would just have to dissolve and not be a thing anymore.
Otherwise, they'd be backing down to just kick the Baltics out or whatever.
But that's a real problem, is that they don't want to disband NATO.
America's entire dominance in Europe is based on this military alliance with France and Germany and Britain above all, right?
And so how could they ever actually negotiate a situation where we go ahead and cut the Baltics loose?
I guess that also raises the question of just assuming, I don't know, whoever succeeds Putin does invade the Baltics because he feels like it one day.
Would America really fight for them?
Would Article 5 actually go into effect and we'd really trade Houston for, you know, whatever the hell, I can't remember the names of their cities there.
Talin?
Yeah, I think this is a very hard question.
A really difficult question.
It's like Tibet.
It's another example of a place, or Taiwan for that matter, of places that I believe, morally speaking, have a right to their independence and should be protected.
I don't think that Russia has a right to claim that the Baltic republics belong back under their control.
I think that Taiwan has a moral right if it so chooses to pursue its own way without control from Beijing, morally speaking.
I think Tibet has that right.
The question is how do we in this world ensure that that is protected without going to world war?
And that's a very difficult question for all of us to figure out.
I do not have the answer.
I do not think that we should have a world war to protect the Baltic republics.
But I do think we should try, they do have their right to independence and we should find ways as best we can to ensure that.
Which by the way, just for argument's sake, I mean, that is just for argument's sake, a hypothetical.
I don't believe for a minute the hype that Russia is, you know, plans on violent attack against any of the Baltics any time in our lifetime whatsoever.
It's just, this is what the war party always says.
So I'm using that as a hypothetical, but I thought I better clarify that.
Because I don't want to like add to the scaremongering here.
I don't think so either.
I don't think that they have a plan for outright invasion.
But there is lots of things short of that, that one can contemplate.
And we can look at Ukraine as an example.
There are large Russian minorities in the Baltic republics that could be stirred up to create trouble.
As it happens, my understanding is those Russian minorities in the Baltic republics would much rather be part of the West than to be brought back into the Russian fold.
But I agree with you though, that an outright invasion by Russia, I think is a low prospect.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, I've been putting off China here because I know so little about it.
But you know, I wonder how much of China's buildup, even in terms of creating these islands and these new bases and stuff, is really a reaction to American provocations in the Pacific in the first place.
No, this is different.
The case of the South China Sea is a legacy of the fact that the United States, going back to the Spanish-American War in 1898, has stated that our forward defense line, our sphere of influence in Asia, extends to the South China Sea.
You know, this is Teddy Roosevelt speaking.
This is not new.
We don't defend our Pacific shores off the coast of San Diego and Los Angeles.
We defend our Pacific shores off the coast of Shanghai.
And this is not new.
This is over a century, this has been the case.
So from a Chinese perspective, this is deeply humiliating as they rise to a great power to have their rival just off their shore with its military and its bases.
And this is truly inconceivable for China as it rises to great power status.
They want to see the United States move its front line back, like to the middle of the Pacific.
And if you travel to China and speak with ordinary Chinese people and scholars and students, not officials, but just ordinary people in China, this is what they will tell you.
By what right do you Americans have to patrol in your ships right off our shore?
Go back to your shore, they'll say.
So building up the islands in the Pacific in the South China Sea by the Chinese, I think, is an attempt for them to alter this historical fact and to try to alter the situation to give them the claim that they have arrived as a great power.
And this is naturally going to create a clash, a geopolitical clash with the United States.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, again, it just, politically, it seems impossible for the Americans to back down and say, well, I guess it makes sense for you guys to have some kind of Monroe-type doctrine over there, you know, the way we have one or something.
But no, our Monroe doctrine applies to the whole planet.
Nobody else can have one at all.
That's how it works, really.
Well, this is the dilemma.
This is really the big dilemma of the 21st century, I think, is how can the United States accommodate itself to the rise of another great power without creating Armageddon?
And we've fought two world wars about this before, when Germany was the rising power.
So we know what bad things could happen when this process arises.
So we see this with China.
And I think that we have to have very wise heads in Washington and in Beijing and in Tokyo, elsewhere, to ensure that this historical process is managed in a sane and prudent fashion.
Am I just hopelessly naive if I think that it doesn't matter at all, that you could just completely abolish the entire Navy forever, and that we have no enemies, and that we can get along with China, and that I don't care at all how powerful China is relative to Japan or Outer Mongolia or any other thing, and that America should just mind its own business, and that everything on Earth would be more or less fine, much better than it is now?
You know, I'd like to have that conversation with you and look over its pros and cons.
I think that our allies like Japan and the Philippines would be very worried about that, but they already see, you know, where the future lies.
People like Duterte in the Philippines, a despicable character in many respects, but he sees that in the future, there are going to be two giants in Asia, the US and China, and he has to learn how to get along with both of them.
And play one against the other, perhaps?
I think that is the future.
So we should look to him and other leaders in Asia who recognize that there has to be some kind of balance between the two.
I think that's the path to follow, is some kind of orderly, not complete withdrawal of the United States, but some kind of orderly process whereby China gets to have some of the things it wants without turning the applecart over.
Well, the South Koreans are certainly taking the initiative to change the game on the Korean Peninsula there right now, aren't they?
Who's doing that?
Moon, the president.
Oh, yes.
The president Moon of...
See, now he strikes me as the kind of leader that we need in the future, somebody who can balance all of these competing powers to try to achieve some degree of stability and sanity.
All right, listen, I'm sorry for keeping you over time, but I just like talking with you so much.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show.
It's been a pleasure, always, Scott.
Take care.
You too.
All right, you guys, that's the great Michael T. Clair from tomdispatch.com, mostly.
And teaches peace and world security.
What a great name for a job, huh?
Professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, and he's the author of a bunch of books, most recently, The Race for What's Left.
And you guys know me, I'm scotthorton.org for the show and youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Find all the interviews there and subscribe and all that on the RSS feeds, iTunes, Stitcher, etc.
You can find me also at antiwar.com and the Libertarian Institute.
And follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
Thanks.
Oh, yeah.
And buy my book, Fool's Aaron.
How could I forget that?
Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
It's at foolsaaron.us.
And the audiobook is out now, too.
So, yeah.