All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Ted Galen Carpenter from the Cato Institute, and here he is writing at the National Interest the very important story that was the spotlight on antiwar.com the other day.
How the media mangled the Russian invasion of the Trump administration.
Welcome back to the show, Ted.
How are you doing, sir?
Well, thank you very much.
It's a great pleasure to be back.
Good deal.
Very happy to have you here and happy to read you trashing Russiagate and all the spies and media charlatans who are continuing to push this hoax on us.
I think it's just one big hoax still, but obviously we've got to start with the recent allegations about the Russians paying for American scalps in Afghanistan.
Tell me you fell for that one for a minute, huh?
Well, it was weird.
I mean, I've reached the point of thinking there is no report seemed far fetched enough that the media won't buy it and run with it.
And this was a perfect example of it.
This was a nothing burger of a story.
It was based on reports from the Afghan government through U.S. intelligence agents with the CIA saying that under interrogation, translation torture, some Taliban prisoners, unspecified in number, had indicated that the Russian government was paying the Taliban bounties to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Well, I don't think the Taliban really needs that kind of incentive to begin with.
Secondly, even the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency considered these reports improbable, gave the reports their lowest rating, low confidence rating, that they were valid.
And yet the New York Times did a front page story on it, and the rest of the media immediately echoed those charges as if they were established fact.
And that's a pattern that we have seen about every negative report, every allegation about Russian alleged mischief throughout the Trump years.
And it's a regrettable pattern.
It is damaging the media's already tarnished credibility, and it's creating needless tensions with a country that has over 2,000 nuclear weapons.
Not a good idea.
Yeah.
What's wrong with a little nuclear fusion?
It's hotter than the sun, but just for a moment, you know, it'll be over before you know it.
Yeah.
There you go.
Nothing to worry about at all now.
So here's the thing about it, too, is, well, I want to focus on what you say about the media there, the way that they all acted like, oh, my God, it's in The New York Times and we all know it's true now, and let's just run with that.
When in the first place, the Charlie Savage piece, the original New York Times story and all the rest of them after that, for that matter.
But even in that original piece, it was the thinnest of claims.
And for any news anchor who actually read the story, it said all over the story, if this is true, it would mean this.
And if verified, it would mean that.
And all we're really saying is that it is a confirmed fact that there is an intelligence report that says this may have happened.
And that's essentially it.
They weren't saying it was true.
They weren't saying they could.
In fact, they explicitly, you could almost hear the editor insisting that, well, you're going to have to say we don't have any direct connection to any attack on American troops in Afghanistan in there.
And they did say that.
They admitted that.
So even if you just absolutely have a vendetta against Trump and Putin and what have you, you have to admit that's a pretty thin story to take off and run with the way that they did.
But boy, did they.
And it worked right for two weeks.
This story dominated and, you know, even pushed the covid and all the rest of the things out of the news.
Look, as you quote Nancy Pelosi saying, would Trump all roads lead to Putin?
That's the only explanation for what's going on around here is this man's treason.
Scott, you were quite correct that the New York Times story at least included the caveats.
Now, a lot of the caveats were buried in the middle paragraphs and certainly the headline and the opening paragraph didn't really reflect that that qualification.
But the the worst aspect was that the caveats disappeared virtually from other media outlets that picked up the Times story.
It very quickly became, well, this is a report.
And if true, this could be very serious.
It became instead.
The Russians are paying bounties to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.
Right.
And Trump isn't doing anything that was indisputable.
Yeah.
Right.
That's a flat fact.
And then the scandal is that Trump is so subservient to Putin that he just lets this happen and refuses to, I don't know, bomb Moscow or whatever he's supposed to do in response.
Start sending home Russians in body bags.
It did have a big impact.
Not only did it at least rival the coronavirus stories for prominence for the next week, week and a half, but a public opinion survey indicated that roughly 60 percent of Americans believed that the Russians had bounties on American troops in Afghanistan.
And again, this is based on a very thin, uncorroborated report that even two of the major intelligence agencies did not buy.
Right.
And in fact, even the CIA that were the ones who were out front pushing it, you know, I guess as Gareth Porter clarified, the Directorate of Operations or whatever they call it now, I think they changed the name of it, but the clandestine side, they were the ones pushing this from Afghanistan.
But the analysts back in Langley only gave it medium confidence, which is equivalent to, yeah, it could be, but we have no evidence of it.
Can't corroborate it.
Can't prove it.
And that was the agency that was out front.
Only gave it medium confidence.
And you know, you mentioned earlier about the NSA didn't like it.
Well, even better and worse than that, the NSA, because this was leaked to the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal all at the same time, and Warren Strobel and the Wall Street Journal had run a story just like it.
The NSA immediately, apparently called Warren Strobel and said, this is nonsense.
And then he printed that the next day, NSA, you know, craps all over my story and says that they don't believe it.
So at least you've got to give them credit for that.
But to me, that's huge because the NSA disagreeing is one thing, the NSA calling up Warren Strobel and saying, we disagree and we want you to print that on the front page of the Wall Street Journal tomorrow.
That is huge.
Yeah, your distinction is absolutely crucial.
The NSA disputing the findings of one of the other intelligence agencies is a bit unusual.
The NSA going public big time with its disagreement, that is astonishing.
And that suggests, again, just how weak the intelligence experts considered this report of alleged Russian bounties.
And yet, that division within the intelligence apparatus, that unusual degree of skepticism by the NSA, the highly unusual step of the NSA going public with a disagreement, almost none of that was captured, much less emphasized in the media accounts regarding this allegation.
Right.
You know, it's interesting, the social psychology of the way that these stories play out, because I wrote my article for Antiwar.com and I was brave enough to call it a hoax in the headline.
But then the way I introduced the subject was, there's no reason for you to believe this.
You know, certainly not yet.
I don't even think I said that.
But at the time, I was thinking, you know, I am taking a risk.
This is the thing that everybody seems to agree on.
And whatever their evidence is, supposedly, I haven't seen it yet.
I don't know the basis for the story.
So I can confidently say that they've yet to prove it.
But to tell you that this is a stupid lie, don't fall for it.
I'm kind of out over my skis talking about something that I'm actually not certain of.
I'm just saying this sure looks just like another one.
But there's that feeling that I could be embarrassed.
I could say that this is a stupid hoax.
And then next week, it turns out they actually did have something or something.
But so, of course, I'm just going to do what I want anyway, because I don't care what anybody thinks except myself.
But at the same time, though, that is there, right?
It's something to think about.
Sort of like with the weapons of mass destruction.
I remember, too, thinking, hey, you know, it's possible that Saddam might have hung on to one warehouse full of some mustard gas or something, just, you know, as a friend of mine put it, like having a rifle on the wall, but doesn't really mean anything.
You know, kind of something like that.
Because geez, who wants to just declare that?
I guarantee you, he's got nothing at all.
That kind of deal.
But somehow, even after weapons of mass destruction, even after back in the moderate rebel terrorists in Syria, even after all of the various sarin hoaxes and all of the other things, that, you know, the dominant narrative and the consensus view by the government and the media is extremely powerful.
And I can see why, you know, a lot of people, even like on Russiagate, you have people who were very hesitant to dismiss the idea that the Russians were the ones who hacked the DNC, even though there's still no reason to believe that whatsoever, other than some liar made that up.
I mean, give me a break.
There's no reason to believe that.
And yet you still have people going, well, I mean, I'm not saying they didn't.
I'm just saying, you know, I don't know, you know, kind of thing.
So even for those of us, and I'm talking about on our side, right, all the skeptics who would never fall for one of these things, even for myself, I feel that kind of, it might be true.
It's never true, though, Ted.
It's never true.
Well, I think people in the alternate media always feel they have to be more cautious.
If the mainstream media figures get something totally wrong, it simply disappears down the memory hole.
They're never called out on it.
Whereas if someone outside that media establishment gets something wrong, they're never allowed to forget it.
And that does create a somewhat defensive mentality at times.
About a little over a year ago, Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept did a very detailed story on the 10 worst media cases of disinformation about the Russia collusion scandal and the issues surrounding that.
He did 10 examples, as well as five dishonorable mentions, to bring the total to 15.
And one of the things that was interesting is that with a good many of those stories, the media outlets that had circulated those false accounts never retracted them.
And certainly their colleagues in the media never called them on it.
And I think that illustrates the problem that you're discussing, that the misinformation, the disinformation that sometimes takes place with regard to the so-called mainstream media has a degree of protection, a degree of power, that critics of especially U.S. foreign policy simply cannot enjoy.
They do not have that latitude.
Right.
Yeah, they're still hanging on to their Pulitzer Prizes that they won over their Russiagate coverage.
Indeed.
Intelligence sources say that multiple high-level members of the Trump campaign team had secret meetings with Russian intelligence officials, declared the New York Times, which was not true at all.
And they won Pulitzer Prizes for that.
And they walk around proudly, like none of them gave them back and said, sorry, or, you know.
Well, if you believe the conventional narrative of the Mueller investigation confirmed the Russia collusion story, never mind that the Mueller report states very clearly they could not find any credible evidence that high-level officials of the Trump campaign colluded illegally with the Russian government.
And that's very troubling that that kind of disinformation circulates.
And readers and viewers tend to believe their first impressions, even when stories are walked back, even when corrections are issued, that first impression is absolutely crucial.
And that's why you still have over 30 percent of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein really did have an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
Never mind that that story has been completely debunked over the years.
Yeah.
I had a friend of mine I talked to on the phone who's not really a political guy.
I just know him from real life.
And he said that my article on Russia, the bounties thing, had gone around on Facebook, I guess.
And he read it.
And he was like, yes, you know, you make a good point.
Then again, I read this story that said that, yeah, the Russians have been backing them over there since 2014 against us.
And I'm like, yeah, but you just said you read my article where this is all based on anonymous CIA officials and how these are the same people who deliberately torture lies out of people and how you'd be crazy to accept this before you know it for a fact.
Give me a break.
You know, they lie about everything.
That was what I told him.
They lie about everything.
Why would you give them the benefit of the doubt?
But even then, again, back to that thing, it's like I'm the one out on a limb.
All of officialness says that this is true.
But you know, protest boy from antiwar.com doesn't believe in it.
So do you expect him to?
You know what I mean?
So it's like the burden of proof is still totally on me to disprove it.
And even if I throw as much cold water on it as I can, it's still only marginally effective compared to more articles coming out insisting that it is true still, even though they still don't prove it because they can't because it's not.
Well, again, as you've indicated, the the Russia bounty story is based on such thin information and speculation.
But one of the one of the features, I think, that really makes that story doubtful.
Is the fact that the United States has lost eight troops in Afghanistan this year.
Now, if Russia had a lucrative bounty program.
That has to be the most ineffectual program in history.
Yeah.
Even worse than the usual government programs from any government.
Right.
I mean, eight, if not all eight, but most people who die in shootings in in major American cities in that amount of time.
Sure, we know that almost all of those guys, if not every single one of them, were killed either in Nangarhar province fighting ISIS types, Green Berets or the Marines down in Helmand fighting the Taliban.
And none of them have anything to do with the supposed connections with these guys up in the north of the country, etc.
So no correlation, even if you really wanted to try to pretend causation, you don't even have a correlation to cause it here, man.
Yeah, I mean, this is this is basically a news story in quotes based on puffed air.
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And now, as you said, it worked.
The American people bought it and it only matters that they bought it temporarily.
And I guess if they buy it permanently, that's, you know, even better.
But they just have to buy it while it counts.
And they did.
And it worked.
And Trump backed down on his musing about pulling all the troops out before the election.
And you have to wonder if that isn't an underlying motive for the anonymous intelligence agents who leaked that story.
And again, it absolutely worked.
You had a bipartisan coalition in the House of Representatives immediately pushing a resolution to delay any withdrawal decision from Afghanistan.
I mean, here we are stuck in that country with an absolutely unwinnable mission rapidly approaching its second decade.
And that instead of talking about why in the world weren't we out of Afghanistan many, many years ago, we are seeing yet another delay in withdrawing the remaining troops.
And you do have to wonder if that's coincidence or if that was a reason why the unnamed intelligence officials leaked the so-called bounty story.
Yeah.
There are people in the bureaucracy that don't want us to terminate the mission in Afghanistan or any other U.S. military involvement anywhere in the world.
Yep.
Even the New York Times editorial page speculated about that and said maybe the evidence was tweaked.
That was their words.
Maybe the evidence was tweaked, the intelligence was tweaked in order to delay the withdrawal plan.
Like, hey, you guys might want to talk to Charlie Savage and Eric Schmidt and David Sanger and the rest of these scumbags pushing the lies over in the news section.
I mean, they're even asking that question.
I keep wondering if they are being duped by these reports or if they're, again, avidly cooperating with hawkish elements in the intelligence bureaucracy trying to extend the mission in Afghanistan and especially trying to generate a more hardline foreign policy toward Russia, as though the current one isn't hard enough.
One of the great myths that keeps having a life of its own is that Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin's puppet and that the United States has adopted this appeasement policy toward Russia.
If you look at the facts, they point to exactly the opposite conclusion.
U.S. policy has become more hardline and more confrontational under Donald Trump than it was under Barack Obama.
With more NATO military exercises, additional members added to NATO, arms sales to Ukraine, three of them were Obama refused to approve even a single arms sale.
The campaigns against Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the attempt to overthrow the left wing government of Venezuela, both of which are Russian clients, all of these things indicate that the Trump administration has pursued a very hardline policy.
The withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and the threat to withdraw from the Open Sky Street, again, actions that the Russian government vehemently opposes.
And yet the myth that the Trump administration is Putin's puppet just doesn't go away.
Right.
Yeah.
And that was Pelosi again on this latest Afghanistan thing said, again, all roads lead to Putin, which is what she said when she literally, unbelievably, but yeah, impeached this president for holding up one of those arms deals to the Nazi infested military of Ukraine temporarily.
And she said all roads lead to Putin, in other words, as you said before, she didn't even get the message that the Mueller report came out and said all of that was fake.
None of it was true.
He was never Putin's anything.
But to her, the speaker of the House of Representatives, of course, the single explanation for it all.
You know, one of the things that's going to be interesting, if Joe Biden wins the upcoming presidential election, will Biden and the Democrats try to walk back the extremely hostile policy toward Russia that they have promoted for better than four years?
That's not going to be easy to do, even if they want to do it.
But I keep worrying that this they see as a political winner to keep up the very confrontational policy toward Moscow, despite the danger that that creates of a crisis, even a an outright military crisis with one of the most powerful militaries in the world, and certainly one with a nuclear weapons capability that is exceeded only by that of the United States.
And it's certainly enough to destroy our entire civilization, all of us in one day.
As most people do know, I hope and think everyone should understand that.
But now, so I have two more questions for you at the end here before we go, Ted.
And oh, you know what?
I'm not running as late as I thought.
I'm not sure how how much of a hurry you're in.
But the two more things I wanted to ask you about was the the way the media has it is that well, and and I guess the intelligence agencies are pushing this to that.
Of course, the reason that the Russians are paying for American scalps is because they're trying to chase us out.
But that seems to me stupid.
And it seems like if it's true, for the hypothetical sake that there's anything to this at all, that the Russians are paying the Mujahideen to send Americans home in body bags, as they like to put it about the Russians, then it would seem like the purpose of that, the most obvious purpose of that would be to accomplish the reaction that they have gotten, which is not to, you know, turn tail and run that, oh, no, the Russians are sniping us, but to again cast Trump in a bad light and cast the entire withdrawal from Afghanistan as Trump's subservience to Putin that he then cannot follow through on.
So apparently they want to keep us there either one for the same reason they've wanted to be our allies there for the last 20 years, which is we're helping keep the Mujahideen down for them, or two, because they're doing to the United States exactly what the United States did to them, bait us into staying longer to bleed us to bankruptcy until our empire finally falls apart the hard way like theirs did.
And so in either case, it seems like the solution would be to get the hell out of there.
Well, again, the United States should have withdrawn from Afghanistan many, many, many years ago, even if you accepted the justification originally following 9-11 that it was an appropriate mission to go after al Qaeda and to punish the Taliban for giving al Qaeda shelter in Afghanistan.
That mission, that justification ended a decade and a half or more ago.
So we are staying on with a vague counterinsurgency, nation building mission that makes no sense whatsoever.
I don't think the Russians particularly care one way or the other.
If the U.S. leaves, that's fine.
That eliminates an annoyance to their overall goal of having the strongest position in Central Asia.
If the U.S. stays, the U.S. is bled and again is entangled in a seemingly endless war.
So there was no logical incentive for the Russians to have this bounty program.
And as I pointed out, that if they did have one, it is the most inept, ineffectual program imaginable.
Yeah, you know, Scott Ritter pointed out in a piece of consortium news that I'm sorry, I forget her first name, but it's Kalamachi is her last name, one of the New York Times reporters that in a follow up interview on MSNBC, she explained that, well, the money is coming.
It's not directly connected to any particular dead American, and apparently there's no communication back through the channel when an American is killed.
And apparently the money keeps coming even when American soldiers aren't being killed.
And so Scott Ritter's saying, and this is assuming there's any money at all, any of this is true at all.
But and Scott Ritter says, yeah, well, that's not how a bounty works, is it?
And, you know, zooming out, we know that the Russians have been talking to the Taliban and it's reported that they've at least offered them money and weapons, although they certainly don't need them.
They got enough money from America and, you know, weapons from the Afghan national security forces that they buy them from with American money.
But that, you know, the Russians have seen that the Americans are leaving and the and they decided to hedge their bets the same way that America did in Iraq with the so-called awakening, the same way that really Trump and Khalilzad are doing with the withdrawal deal, which is split the difference and say, if not outright support, at least make peace with the local Mujahideen as long as they will keep the foreign kooks out.
And so that's the deal.
That's and the Russians have been blatant about that.
Kill ISIS for us, please.
Let's shake hands.
And they're inviting these guys to Moscow and and having peace conferences with the Afghan national government and this kind of thing.
Their motives are completely plain as day.
They're the same ones as the Americans that, oh, geez, we thought we didn't like the Taliban, but we really don't like these Islamic State guys.
So go ahead and kill them for us and maybe we'll look the other way on some of the other things.
That kind of deal.
You might think that the United States doesn't understand that region very well and therefore we should stay out of it instead of constantly being entangled there with an endless mission.
But I guess that is a very radical proposal.
Yeah.
Hey, you know, sorry, just one more thing on this because it's so much fun to me.
I'm sure you've read back in 1997.
I'm sure you probably read it when it first came out.
The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is the child of so much of this stuff.
And I cite this in the book.
I'm sorry, I don't remember the page number anymore.
But he says in there, he says, listen, we have to stay in Afghanistan in order to back the Chinese-Pakistani-Taliban alliance in order to keep the Iranians, the Russians and the Indians out.
And then, of course, that's the exact opposite of the mission that we've been fighting since 2001 has been to put Iran, Russia and India's friends in power there to keep the Chinese friends, the Pakistanis and the Taliban out.
Yeah, I worry about people who use the chess and chessboard analogy to try to make sense of very, very complex regional and world affairs.
If the United States is playing geostrategic chess in Central Asia, it has done one lousy job for several decades.
We need to choose a different game if that's the case.
Yeah.
All right.
And then the last thing is something that you were alluding to there with the conflict with between America and Russia in Eastern Europe there.
And, you know, I was on the Tom Wood show and he asked me, oh, well, what's the Hawks case?
And I said, well, that Russia wants to take over the world, starting with Eastern Europe and everything we do is defensive and that kind of thing.
But which I think is nonsense.
So but I was hoping that you could address, you know, to whatever devil's advocate type degree that you could.
Is there any kind of danger that Putin might invade Latvia in the name of protecting Russian speakers there or any of these things?
He wants to march to Kiev and reabsorb Ukraine into the Russian empire.
Or is there any Russian is there any real Russian aggression?
Without playing it down out of confirmation bias, where is there anything really for America to help confront?
Or is this entire thing basically just cooked up by lockheed lobbyists and their friends?
Well, I never want to speculate and eliminate the possibility that.
That Russia might take action in the near abroad to protect what it sees as its interests.
So coercion of one or more of the Baltic states.
Yeah, it's a possibility.
I don't think it's a great likelihood, but it's possible.
Action against Ukraine becomes a lot more likely if the West, particularly the United States, continues to meddle, continues to try to bring Ukraine into NATO because Russian leaders across the political spectrum regard that as a serious threat to core Russian security interests.
But there's no evidence at all for Russia having a vast expansionist agenda.
They're not about to try to sweep to the Atlantic and dominate all of Europe.
They don't have the capability to try that maneuver, even if they wanted to.
And their behavior militarily is very odd.
If they have a vast expansionist agenda, the Russian military budget is lower now than it was three years ago.
And it's a tiny fraction.
It's in around sixty three billion dollars versus the seven hundred and forty billion dollar U.S. military budget.
And certainly if Russia had expansionist ambitions on that scale, the military spending would be skyrocketing.
It wouldn't be flat to down.
So that's a very curious strategy if the goal of the Putin government is to have rapid and extensive territorial expansion.
So, no, there is not any credible evidence of a great Russian expansionist agenda.
I wonder if that's maybe a kind of silent motive behind sabotaging the Open Skies treaty, is that they can say, well, we don't know what's going on in Russia, whereas before they'd have to admit that we know what's going on in Russia.
They're not mobilizing anything.
They're sitting right there.
Yeah, even if there is some Russian cheating and that's debatable regarding some of the provisions of the Open Skies treaty and the international I'm sorry, intermediate nuclear forces treaty, withdrawing from those treaties is a truly counterproductive move on the part of the United States.
If we really want to enhance stability in the relations with Moscow, that's going about it the exact opposite way of what we should be doing.
All right.
So you mentioned about if Biden comes in, you have this cult of, you know, anti-Russia McCarthy type craziness going on in the Democratic Party for the last few years now.
And so he's going to be hemmed in by that to some great kind of degree.
Although, you know, I have heard, I think Schumer, but certainly Feinstein saying, well, geez, I still like these treaties and stuff.
I'd like to keep them because, you know, some of these senators know a thing or two about this stuff.
And, you know, when it comes to the real brass tacks, they don't want to dismantle the the real high level cooperation between America and Russia on these most important issues.
So there's, you know, some kind of realism there.
But I wonder, too, about what you think about Putin's openness in dealing with the United States.
You know, I'm familiar with him always referring to America as our American partners and this kind of thing as, oh, you guys might talk bad about me all day, but I still like you.
And I think that we ought to be able to work together on these important things.
But I don't know to what degree he really means that.
And I don't know if that door is closing or, you know, how bad that looks to you.
Well, Putin has always been very much a pragmatist, but there was a statement by the Russian defense minister just a couple of weeks ago mentioned in the national interest where he basically said, we have no reason to trust the United States and we have no confidence in what the United States says or does.
That's not a good sign.
And the U.S.-Russia relationship has been deteriorating for well over two decades, ever since the Clinton administration came up with a brilliant idea to expand the most powerful military alliance in the history of the world, NATO, right up to Russia's borders.
That was not a good move that began the poisoning of the bilateral relationship with Russia.
And it has just gotten steadily worse over the years.
And I would like to see that process reversed, but I see almost no constituency within either of the two major parties for taking that step.
Yeah.
You know, our friend Doug Bandow always points out, Doug Bondo, that's how you say it, not how you spell it.
Doug Bondo always likes to point out that, you know, the Germans aren't buying new tanks.
They're not building up their forces.
And that can mean only one thing.
They're not worried about Russia and they don't want to fight them again.
And they're just not willing to abandon their national interest for this narrative.
They're just not willing to do it.
And that should be all we need to know.
It's not just that they're relying on us.
It's that they don't feel like there's a danger here.
Right.
Well, certainly they're not acting as though they think there's a danger.
And that's actually true of most of the East European members of NATO as well.
Yes, a few have met the U.S. demand to spend at least two percent of gross domestic product per year on their militaries.
But they've done that reluctantly, and several of them still have not reached that target.
So that doesn't suggest a tremendous degree of alarm on their part that a Russian attack is imminent.
And I think we ought to take a step back, understand that most of the trouble, not all, but most, with Russia has been as a result of very arrogant actions on the part of the United States and its NATO allies.
And that policy needs to change.
It needs to change significantly or tensions can get out of hand.
Nobody should want to see that.
Right.
You know, it's funny, at the risk of like this backfiring, I think maybe it can be helpful to make this personal where people get so tied up with their identity and America that you're blaming America.
But what if we just blame Bill Clinton and George W.
Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump for making bad decisions?
That seems plausible, that Bill Clinton would do something that's wrong.
I've heard of that before.
You know, so.
Well, these are the people responsible for the bad decisions.
That's absolutely right.
Nobody took a referendum in the United States for any of these steps.
Right.
And now, so I'm sorry to keep you, but I'm just fascinated by this.
And I know that you were so good on this when it really mattered, even, you know, way back then in the 90s.
And they were really first starting on this.
I am under the impression.
That the people who were expanding NATO essentially saw it as one, a great welfare program for Lockheed and all of the companies they wanted to keep in business, who might have to, you know, get real jobs after the end of the Cold War and that kind of thing.
But at the same time, because Yeltsin was such a pushover and essentially our friend, because he's more or less under American influence and this kind of thing, that.
They did not necessarily see this as, you know, secretly a plan to encircle and threaten and contain Russia even more than before.
Maybe some did, but maybe most saw it as just, no, we'll have the Russian NATO council.
Well, maybe we'll even invite them into NATO.
But maybe more importantly than anything else is we're getting to meet new Eastern European elites at these fancy cocktail parties and have a nice time being American slash bureaucrats with power and influence.
And that it became NATO expansion became sort of just like a social club of important Madeleine Albright-ites, if that makes sense, where, you know, the the tails really wagging the dog.
And maybe we kind of ended up then Dick Cheney takes power and is like, yes.
And, you know, decides this is all about clamping down.
But I don't know how much of that is just sort of my misunderstanding and mischaracterization of of how those things played out.
But it seemed like there was a bit of that.
I think there was a mixture of motives.
You have the delusional faction promoting NATO expansion that thought Russia really wouldn't mind that much.
This would stabilize the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and create a vast new market for lots of American goods, most definitely military goods.
And then you have the people who I think knew exactly what the effect of NATO expansion would be, that that would create new tensions with Russia and that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States needed a new enemy to justify the ongoing foreign policy of global interventionism.
So I don't think it was an either or proposition.
It was a mixture of individuals and a mixture of motives.
That makes sense.
So then when Putin took over on New Year's 2000.
It was half terror and half a sigh of relief that now we can get back to business.
This guy wants to declare independence from us.
Great.
We can sell some more planes.
Well, except that Putin himself seemed maybe not like Yeltsin, but but not unduly hard line or confrontational at the beginning.
It was only later that he adopted a a much more resistant policy to what the United States was doing.
His speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, I think, was kind of the declaration of a new, less cooperative Russian policy where he cites almost all the grievances of what the United States and its Western allies have been doing to undermine Russian interest, to show contempt for Russian core security interests, and that this was going to stop.
He would not put up with it any longer.
And that came as a shock to the Western attendees at that conference.
And I said at the time, why on earth did that come as a shock?
I'm just amazed that it took this long for the Russians to dig in their heels and resist constantly being poked in the chest by the United States and its NATO allies.
No great power is going to put up with that indefinitely if they can, if that power can avoid it.
Yeah, just one final point on that was Andrew Coburn's report for Harper's right when Russia's Little Green Men seized the Crimean Peninsula, that he had a source that was at a big cocktail party in Crystal City, which is the suburb of Washington, D.C., where many defense contractors are headquartered and whatever.
And they were in the middle of a big party anyway, for whatever reason, when the story broke that the Russians are seizing Crimea and everybody celebrated, yay, that this is going to be you know, this is exactly what they want, is confrontation, excuse to sell some long range bombers and damn true that they don't really, really sad.
That is really sad.
I know it's just.
Anyway, we could go on like this all day, and I'm sure you have other important things to do, but I appreciate it so much for you coming on the show, Ted.
Yeah, no problem.
Happy to do it.
All right, you guys, that is the great Ted Galen Carpenter, of course, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and here writing for the national interest, how the media mangled the Russian invasion of the Trump administration.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
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