I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at ScottHorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
All right you guys, on the line I've got the great Ray McGovern, regular contributor at Antiwar.com, and the latest is called Biden-Putin Summit, Boon or Bust.
I like your little play on words there.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How's it going?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
Very happy to have you on the show here, and happy to hear that.
And did I say, I usually say, Ray was an analyst at the CIA for 27 years, used to brief Bush Sr. and Reagan at least from time to time back then, and was for a time the head of the Soviet division, and so is a real expert on Russia.
And as you guys know, has spent the entire 21st century at least opposing all aspects of the terror war and America's cold wars, especially with Russia.
So this is such an important article.
I really hope that people will go and take a look at it.
So they are meeting.
Biden is meeting with Putin in Geneva when?
On the 16th.
On the 16th.
All right.
That's less than a week from now.
OK, so it says here you asked for it, Joe.
Is that right?
It was the U.S. president that asked for this meeting with Vladimir Putin, right?
Yeah.
You know, it's it's really been hard to assess the whys and wherefores of this meeting, because it came the proposal came at such an odd time at a peak of tension between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine.
And so, you know, we old Russian or they used to call us criminologists, we were left to our own devices, which meant reading everything, especially high level statements, and then trying to reconstruct how this all came about.
And it dawned on me, hello, Biden suggested it.
The ball's in his court, as I put in a little subtitle here, you asked for it, Joe.
Now, what did you have in mind?
Looking at how things went down with respect to Ukraine, where we almost got into an armed confrontation there, it became very clear to me that it started back on the 24th of March when Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, said, you know, we're going to take back Crimea.
We're going to unoccupy or get the Russians out of there.
And we're going to use military means to do that.
Then he starts sending military means south and east toward Crimea and the eastern provinces.
And the Russians react, you know, they start sending troops and armaments west and south.
So that's what it started.
That's the 24th of March.
Then if you fast forward, you get to one very curious day, which is the 13th of April when all kinds of things happened.
All of a sudden, the NATO secretary general said, my God, the Russians are amassing troops near the Ukrainian border, thousands and thousands of them.
Then same day, Defense Minister Shoigu gets up and says, yeah, you're right.
That's right.
Jens Stoltenberg, you got that exactly right, which you believe two armies and three airborne formations.
Same day, the Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov, Sergei Ryabkov, gets up and he says, look, you know, you people in the West, you're turning Ukraine, his words, you're turning Ukraine into a power cake.
And by the way, if you send those two guided missile destroyers through the Dardanelles into the Black Sea, well, we can't guarantee their security.
Not a good idea.
Forget about that.
Now, at precisely that time, the U.S. Navy decided to change its plans.
And those two guided missile destroyers went to Greek waters rather than into the Black Sea.
But finally, and this is the denouement here, Biden calls Putin, hmm, that's interesting.
Has he described the talk, he says it was very candid and very respectful.
The Putin people, his spokesman says, you know, it was it was businesslike, but it was rather long.
What does that mean?
Biden does ramble sometimes.
Is that what he meant?
He's trying to explain.
So the way I can reconstruct that is that Biden and Sullivan and Blinken, those wet behind the ears advisors, those sophomores say, oh, my God, two full armies and three airborne formations.
And Putin later talking about asymmetric distribution of power in that area.
We better we better talk to him and oh, here's an idea.
Let's propose a summit that should calm things down.
Whoa.
Man, you know what?
I got two follow ups for you already.
The first thing is, it's almost beside the point that we're on now, but we'll get back to that.
The first thing is, what is going on with Zelensky that he would dare to say, oh, yeah, we're going to take back Crimea.
They are not going to take back Crimea.
What is behind him doing that in the first place?
And then secondly, when you go through this, I mean, you're right.
That's right.
We got huge armored divisions and ready to go.
And by the way, you shouldn't bring your Navy gunboats near here because we can't guarantee their safety.
That's a pretty tough talk.
But you know what?
I just kind of get the idea.
I'm an amateur criminologist here, myself here.
I got the idea there's something else that happened that we don't know about.
But that, you know, something I don't know, say, for example, a heightening of alert on the part of Russia's long range air force or, you know, something like that that really made Sullivan sweat, you know, something beyond just this.
I don't know.
Because you're right.
I mean, that's a pretty big deal.
Right.
That, you know, Biden obviously gave the order.
Turn those boats around.
We're not doing this.
And something really scared them out of I don't know.
But I don't understand why they were being so escalatory in the first place.
Like, for example, that guy's Zelensky.
Was he off the reservation here?
They told him to say that stuff.
Well, you know, the reservation is composed of all kinds of folks.
And short answer is Zelensky was listening to the same folks that that persuaded Chakashvili in Georgia to give the Russians a bloody nose there up their border back in 2008.
Right.
Yeah.
And so these people get illusions of grandeur and forget who they really have to listen to.
And if Victoria Nuland is talking to Zelensky and saying, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
Take back Crimea.
We don't recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea.
Go ahead.
Now, what's the worst thing that could happen from Nuland's point of view?
Well, the Russians will give Zelensky a bloody nose and that will be Russian aggression, just like it's portrayed to be Russian aggression against Chakashvili.
And to underscore my point, Chakashvili became a big advisor to the Ukrainian leaders after the coup.
So that's that's how I interpret the different voices from Washington.
And Zelensky was really feeling his oats.
And the rhetoric itself, you know, here's Biden himself talking about, you know, unwavering support and Blinken unwavering support.
Well, when when Shoigu, the defense minister, said, would you believe two full armies and three airborne formations?
Well, there was a waiver in that unwavering support.
They knocked it off.
And Zelensky himself said, you know, we better do this peacefully.
That was obscured.
The only person who noticed that was Moon of Alabama, because Zelensky put it on his Facebook page.
That's all it was.
So that's that's how I read how Zelensky would be feeling his oats.
Now, on the other point, Biden needing additional, you know, I don't think he needed additional to have his pants scared off and have his people, his young people say, oh, my God, look what Zelensky, maybe Victoria told Zelensky, we better do something.
I think there's enough there.
There could be some, you know, heightened alert and all that kind of thing.
But, you know, that seemed to be quite enough.
And the way I think maybe I said this before, but I think Biden was encouraged to call Putin.
I think whoever was the KGB resident or whoever it was in Washington that was doing Putin's bidding said, you know, Putin just told me that you're playing with fire and that you better call him right quick because things are getting out of hand.
These things usually happen.
Biden, of course, wants to take the initiative.
He'd call Putin.
He doesn't answer Putin's calls.
He puts it on voicemail, for God's sake, because, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I think there's quite enough to justify, to account for this change in tone and the sudden extraordinary asymmetric, if you will, proposal.
Let's get together and talk about the whole range of U.S.-Russian relations.
Well, good.
And so, I mean, one thing about Biden, he seems to know he's a one term guy and that means he can get away with blue bloody murder.
But it also maybe means he can do some things that are less worse and let Kamala Harris take the hit for it.
I don't know.
I mean, if he knew he was if he was 20 years younger and he knew he was staying, he wouldn't be getting out of Afghanistan right now.
Right.
You know, I don't know how to read that.
Initially, I thought, well, here's a one term guy.
What's he got to lose?
He knows the he knows the chaos that he caused before Iraq.
He knows that he's responsible in some measure for hundreds of, well, millions of people being killed and millions more being in exile from that poor part of the world.
Maybe he's got a conscience after all.
Maybe he could take risks as a one term president that he wouldn't be able to otherwise.
I don't know about that.
That was speculation to begin with.
He's still Joe Biden, right?
I mean, on his very best day, he's pretty bad.
He's not the sharpest knife in the draw.
And so it may have come to him as a complete surprise that the Russians are really, really serious about Ukraine and that everybody's trim his sails.
Now, I guess the implications of all that is that, well, how do the Russians react?
Well, here it came, you know, three weeks after Biden said, you know, I don't think I don't think Putin has a soul.
And by the way, I think he's a killer, right?
So Putin sort of smirks and he reacts by saying, budz torov, budz torov, which means please be healthy.
I wish you good health, Mr. Biden.
And the Russians are always interested in face to face encounters.
So they weren't going to turn it down.
And by the way, I have to add here, because it is an outrage that the media completely misquoted must have deliberately misquoted Putin, where he said, you know, as we used to say on the playground, the wife speaks Russian.
So I had her translated for me, as we used to say on the playground, one calls others what one is himself, something very close to that.
And then they turn that into takes one to know one, which is an American idiom and which has the whole thing about, yes, you're right, I am a killer built into it, which the actual phrase did not.
So anyway, sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, it's just they lie about every damn thing.
Everything.
Well, either they lie about it or they totally ignore it.
So here we had, you know, this bizarre situation where this killer's asked to a full dress summit soon and he reacts by saying, OK, well, be healthy and let us know what your plans are.
And then the rhetorical facade had to be built that, you know, this was not a big deal.
Biden's going to Europe anyway, he's going to Group 7 and then he's going to NATO, he's going to talk to the leaders of the EU and he'll tack on this little summit in Geneva.
It's as though, you know, Biden said to his to his young advisors, you know, make a note, make a note so we don't forget to stop in Geneva on our way home.
So so the expectations were immediately flattened down.
But what's become clear from from the rhetoric that exists, and there has been plenty over the last week, last Friday, for example, Putin talked a lot about this in St. Petersburg.
And so so the the agenda seems to be, yeah, let's tamp down regional conflicts.
Let's see if we can start again on nuclear negotiations.
Let's see if we can maybe even talk about cyber security.
Now, there is room for for movement on all three of those on cyber security, which I see as a really neuralgic issue.
I mean, nobody can know who's hacking, right?
So somebody hacks into part of our strategic defensive operation and it could be the Russians.
It could be the Russians.
So we're going to start a nuclear war and kill everybody on this planet because it could be the Russians.
The Russians have outstanding proposal for about four years now, if memory serves, to talk to talk about cyber security, to talk about the dangers that exist now.
And the sooner that happens, the better.
Now, it could be that Biden will see his way clear to doing that, all the more so because the U.S. is much more vulnerable in this area than the Russians are.
And I have that on very good authority.
All us, which is that they're much more vulnerable.
There are many more of them.
So that would make that would make sense, as well as tamping down regional conflicts, setting up ways to deal with these things so that the president doesn't have to call the other president and say, let's have a summit.
That kind of thing can be can happen.
But meanwhile, the rhetorical facade has to continue because, as Putin himself said, you know, our relationship with the United States is really held hostage by the notion that we're bad, we're evil, and the domestic politics fit in here.
So Biden is not his own man, says Putin in Sotovoce.
And so he recognizes that both sides finally say there's not going to be any great breakthrough, but it'll be a good thing, as Putin said Friday, the very the very fact of starting talks with your opposite number or whatever is achieved is, if so facto, a good thing.
Well, and very importantly here, I'm scanning for the quote, I can't find it.
The part where Putin talks about domestic politics in the United States dictating the policy here is and really, it's, you know, it goes along with all of the rest of the quotes that you have in here.
And I don't think you're probably cherry picking because this is consistent with, you know, all the translations of Putin I've ever seen, where he refuses to take the bait on this stuff, right?
He's not an emotional type creature.
Maybe he's a cold blooded killer, but he doesn't seem to ever get upset.
So he says, Oh, our American partners.
Yeah, we have some disagreements with them.
But yeah, we're gonna we have all these ideas for how we could work together on areas of mutual concern.
It's like he always talks that way when the Americans are, you know, even he just when but when Biden calls them a killer where he just smiles, he doesn't care about that kind of thing in the way that the Americans just get so hyped up.
But then he's saying, oh, here's the quote, to a certain extent, Russian American relations have become hostage to internal political processes in the United States itself.
In other words, just as Justin Raimondo wrote in his libertarian realism, that all American foreign policies are determined by domestic politics.
And they have almost nothing to do with the countries on the receiving end of this.
Well, that's not really right.
But just you know what I mean?
That is absolutely paramount, the domestic pressure.
So for example, the missile defense companies need us to pretend that there's a missile threat from Iran to Central Europe or something like that, when everybody knows that's not true.
But the economics of the situation dictate it, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
As you know, the Democrats in the Cold War with Russia, of course, has been a huge one for the last five years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I coined an acronym which was blessed by Stephen Cohen, the late Stephen Cohen and Pepe Escobar, all kinds of people on the spectrum.
It's the Mickey Matt, rhymes with Mickey Mouse, so you can remember it.
The Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia Think Tank Complex.
In other words, the state.
Yeah.
In other words, that's what Eisenhower called the MIC, the Military Industrial Complex.
These are the people that are running things.
And Putin knows from sad, bitter experience how this works out.
He can agree, for example, with Obama, he can sign off on a ceasefire negotiated painstakingly between Kerry and Foreign Minister Lavrov, 11 months at it, they conclude the ceasefire, they get Putin's and Obama's signature underneath that piece of paper.
And nine days later, the U.S. Air Force deliberately bombs fixed Syrian Army positions known to have been in that area for years, kills about 100 Syrian soldiers.
End of ceasefire.
Yep.
Putin complains.
He says, you know, I don't know how to understand this.
I make these agreements with the President of the United States.
But then when his foreign minister goes back to Washington, not everybody understands or agrees with the president.
And Secretary of State Kerry says, well, you know, we had a lot of opposition there in Washington.
So who's running this foreign policy, says Putin.
Right.
And, you know, which is the same thing that we were asking ourselves at that time, too, that how dare Ashton Carter and some two bit generals overrule the president, United States and whatever you think of John Kerry.
And I don't think much of him.
He's the secretary of state of the United States of America.
That's Thomas Jefferson's chair.
He made a deal with the Russians.
And somehow and I just presume that Ashton Carter was in on because he had complained about the deal in the first place pretty openly in The Washington Post.
But that's the height of insubordination right there.
And it really does go to show that at the end of the day, maybe Obama really wasn't the president very much when it comes down to it.
Well, at the very least, he didn't say diddly, did he?
He didn't.
He didn't fire generals.
He didn't complain.
He left it to John Kerry to sort of wring his hands about three weeks later and say, you know, I try my best, but even agreements signed off by the two presidents.
Well, there's a lot of opposition still.
And he all but said Ashton Carter scuttled the damn thing.
So what I'm saying here and Ashton Carter, by the way, is no John Kerry when it comes to, you know, social class and all this stuff.
Right.
John Kerry is what they call a Boston Brahmin, isn't that right?
And a member of the Skull and Bones at Yale and all these very blue blood things.
Who the hell is Ashton Carter?
Some lobbyists from Raytheon?
Was his father even rich at all?
You know, and I'm not saying that as a rich person, but I'm just saying in terms of, you know, maybe if it was just some loser secretary of state, I don't know.
But John Kerry is like one of the highest status people in America.
You know, what are you going to do?
That's just it.
It is what it is.
Not that I'm a fan of his.
He's the best and the brightest and they're going to bow to the powers that be.
And we had that in spades in Vietnam, where the best and the brightest came down from Harvard and Yale and told President Kennedy, look, these barefooted colored people down there in Vietnam, they won't be able to resist our bombing.
And besides, if we don't, if we don't stay in there, Russia and China or maybe Russia, no, China, maybe both of them will come in and take over the whole world.
These are the best and the brightest.
They think they know what's best for the country because they've been told they're the best and the brightest.
And Kerry was one of them.
I remember he was interviewed, which just goes to show, right, the lack of accountability that he's still one of the highest status people anyway.
And I'm just saying, like, who the hell is Ashton Carter to overrule him, you know?
But you're right that all these people should have been bounced completely out of power generations ago anyway.
Well, you know, this would come up if, as was predicted yesterday, if Biden raises Ukraine, right?
Well, Biden has to know that there was a coup in Kiev orchestrated by the person he's made number three at state, Victoria Nuland, in February of 2014.
And when you say has to know, you mean has to know because we have her on tape saying we're going to get Biden to help glue this thing together.
You got it right.
Yeah.
So here you have documentary evidence.
If things go bump in the night, as I suggest, if it becomes pretty acrimonious, and let's say Biden raises Ukraine, I could conceive of Putin saying, hey, could you bring that tape in here?
Mr. President, I'd like you to listen to this tape and explain to me how you were going to say an attaboy to these neo-fascists that you instilled in Ukraine.
What was that all about, Mr. Biden?
So Putin knows that, Biden knows that.
I think the rhetoric will always be that we, we, the United States, have made sure that Ukraine was respected and all that.
But I think in the dealings, to the degree that, to the degree that Biden and Sullivan and Blinken are still scared, and they should be, I think there will be some sort of modicum effort to work out arrangements where at very least they're better in touch with each other.is the two sides, not necessarily two presidents, that the military continue to talk and that people like Zelensky are not given free reign and told that they have unwavering support to take back Crimea.
Hello?
That really is a bridge too far.
Yeah, that's completely crazy to think that they would challenge the Russians in there.
I mean, I just presume, I don't know, Ray, but you tell me, ever since Putin annexed Crimea in the aftermath of that coup, they must have built up their military forces on that peninsula as well, correct?
Of course they have, yeah.
But before, and this is the interesting point, I hope your listeners remember that the Russians did not invade Crimea.
Right.
It was a coup de main.
They just went outside and said, this is ours now, and that was it.
Well, yeah.
I mean, they had 20,000 troops already there under a bilateral agreement with Ukraine.
And what they did was go around to the various governmental and other agencies in Crimea and said, look, we have instructions from Moscow.
I know that you have no instructions from Kiev.
Please step aside.
We're taking over.
Now, how many people were killed in that Russian, quote, invasion, end quote?
Would you believe zero?
Well, you ask an American and they'll say, oh, probably hundreds of thousands.
It wasn't an invasion and no one was killed.
They just took over.
And then they had a plebiscite.
And the plebiscite, as everyone knew would happen, voted completely, well, 90 percent, they say, to rejoin Russia.
Most of those people are Russians.
They're Russian stock.
And so that happened.
And it was annexed.
So that was the beginning of the thing.
There was no invasion.
And as for Donetsk and Lugansk out there and the Donbass.
Actually, you know what?
I'm sorry, Ray, for interrupting again.
I'm just terrible in this interview.
But and we'll get back to that in just one second.
But I wanted to add here something that I learned from James Carden.
And he has the receipts, too.
I have them in my email somewhere.
I can find it where the British Parliament documented that.
And this was something that I hadn't heard elsewhere.
But the British Parliament in a report talked about how four previous Ukrainian presidents, which I don't know if that was Timoshenko and whoever else, but four previous presidents signed a letter saying, now we must kick the Russians out of the Sevastopol base.
And that was really the very last straw that precipitated the coup d'etat in there was they didn't just outlaw Russian as an official language, which was a huge provocation for the entire eastern half of the country, right?
But and then there was the incident with the bus.
I forgot the exact details.
There's the incident with the bus.
But it was this proclamation by the four former presidents that now is our chance to kick the Russians out of Sevastopol.
That was the last thing before they took over.
So pretty obvious kind of thing, right?
Go ahead.
That may be, Scott.
But more operative, I think, is the fact that Yatsenyuk, the person that Nuland forecast would be prime minister and wonder of wonders became prime minister.
The first two things he did was, number one, as you said, try to ban Russian as an official language.
But number two, let's join NATO.
Now, NATO, of course, that's a bridge too far.
That's that's what the Russians call a red line way back.
And that was one of his first statements when he first took power then in February or early March.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So Yatsenyuk takes power.
First of all, the US recognizes the coup government in record time, right?
Not even a day goes by they recognize it.
You'd think they'd have a little shame.
But no, we didn't.
Talking about Robert Kagan's wife here, man.
They don't know the meaning of shame in the Kagan family.
These are the people who said that Bush should send the Marines to cleanse the West Bank of Palestinians on September the 12th, 2001.
Fred Kagan and Donald Kagan said that.
Her in-laws.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's who those people are.
Anyway, sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Victoria Nuland.
You know, she's a pretty smart lady.
She has to know.
Well, she doesn't have to know, but she should have known that the Russians were not going to let Sevastopol, their only ice free all year round naval base, become part of NATO in the Crimea.
She must have known that the Russians are going to have to react by doing something with respect to Crimea.
And the worse, the better.
If they can represent it as Russia invading Crimea, snatching it back and seizing more territory in an illegal way since World War II, well, so much the better.
We'll do sanctions.
We'll do everything we can to ostracize the Russians.
And of course, that's how it eventually went down.
So yeah, this was so clear.
And the reaction was quite amazing.
On the one hand, the head of Stratfor, a pretty knowledgeable guy, allowed himself to say the coup in Kiev on 22 February 2014 was the most blatant coup in history.
Why?
Because two and a half weeks before it, the intercepted telephone conversation between Nuland and Jeffrey Pyatt, our ambassador in Kiev, was published on YouTube.
You could hear it two and a half weeks before the coup.
They named the guys who were going to take over.
McGovern listens to that and says, oh, you know, I almost feel sorry for Yatsenyuk because it's over for him now.
The whole thing is exposed.
And yet, whoa, on the 22nd, they said it through.
So Ray McGovern, you're so naive.
No, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
And listen, wait, wait, pardon me.
Let me say about that, too.
I'm sorry.
Break your train of thought.
People can find this.
This is famously the F the EU.
And then TV said, well, the scandal is that a diplomat used a bad word when, no, the scandal was she was caught red handed plotting a coup d'etat that took place exactly as described in the phone call a week and a half later.
So it's not even like, hey, look, here's the intercepted phone call that trust us is from earlier in February.
It was published on YouTube earlier in February.
OK, go ahead.
Yeah, on the 4th of February, actually.
So YouTube on the 4th, the coup on the 22nd, you know, when the head of Stratfor calls it the most blatant coup in history, you know, a lot of people said that, you know, they do contract work for the CIA and other government agency.
I think you probably do.
But he said it and he was absolutely right.
And, you know, it's it's quite amazing because Amy Goodman asked me to come on shortly after that and she asked me to debate this fellow Snyder, Professor Snyder from Yale, historian and specialist on Ukraine.
And he was defending what went down.
And I said, now, wait a second.
What about that intercepted conversation where Nuland is plotting the coup?
And you can hear it.
You can hear it for yourself.
And you know what he says?
He says, oh, so that's all you got.
And I'm about to say something else and Amy interrupts me and says, blah, blah, blah.
And I said, I tried to say, time out, Amy.
I've been around at that time around 50 years and I've seen a lot of coups.
So, you know, is that all you got?
Well, isn't that enough for God's sake?
So Biden should know all this.
Well, it wasn't just that.
Right.
Like we saw the diplomatic maneuvering where they had the EU force Yanukovych to sign the deal that said he would agree to new elections and would pull his police forces back and they would agree to shut down the protest movement.
And instead, he pulled his police forces back and they unleashed the Nazis to seize all the government buildings and chased him right out of town.
That's exactly right.
He lived up to his side of the deal.
So that was no accident.
Come on.
Yeah.
And, you know, who knows about that?
The French foreign ministry, the German foreign ministry, Steinmeier, the foreign minister was there at the time, the polls and a personal representative of Putin were all there and agreed on what you just mentioned, what you just explained.
And then, of course, they took advantage of the agreement and chased him out of town.
So they know what went down.
A little vignette here.
It's relevant.
I was talking to Steinmeier, his chief Russian expert, about five years later and in Berlin and we were talking and Ukraine came up.
And I mentioned the coup in Ukraine.
And he looked at me, said, what coup?
And I said, no, wait a second.
You were there.
You were with Steinmeier.
You haven't heard about the coup in Ukraine?
He said, what coup?
So you know, it's different comparing notes with with partners in intelligence services.
You can be sort of candid.
But here was this guy, was there, who saw the agreement that you just described and has the brazenness to say to me, look, it's our party line still that there was no coup and so forth.
So this is very thick.
This is what most Americans have been led to believe.
One short vignette.
I'm in Washington.
I attend this conference, fairly sophisticated people.
And a professor gets up and she says, you know, among other things, I'm very proud of my son.
He's only 10 years old.
But what he did in Sunday school, and somebody said, what did he do?
Well, he did this banner and she shows this banner and she says, Putin, stop killing people.
And this is this is polite applause.
So I raised my hand, you know, the old skunk at the picnic.
I said, Professor, to what are you referring?
And she said, Ukraine, Crimea, invading Crimea.
I said, well, how many people got killed?
Oh, must have been thousands.
I said, Professor, would you believe none?
And everybody turns around and looks at me like I have two heads, you know.
I said, none, zero.
And then I explain what really happened.
So this is a very highly educated international relations professor telling people who are relatively progressive what the party line is and doesn't even know how it went down in Crimea and how it went down in eastern Ukraine.
I would just remind your listeners that those people in Lugansk and Donetsk really wanted to be rejoined, joined to Russia, just as Crimea had been annexed.
And Putin said, sorry, we're not going to do that.
We're not going to do that at all.
There's no naval base in Donetsk or Lugansk.
It's not a strategic thing.
We'll help you as needed.
We'll prevent the Ukrainians from obliterating you.
But that's to the extent of our support.
And they have made that good until now.
It's a nice thing and it's relevant.
The Germans are or have been against giving arms to the Ukrainian neo-Nazis, to Zelensky and all the others.
OK.
Well, how did this come about?
Well, when Obama was being pressured to do this, I had a press conference and Angela Merkel was there in Washington.
I remember it very distinctly.
They were up together, two microphones, and somebody said, President Obama, there was a lot of discussion about giving lethal weaponry to Ukraine.
Are you going to do that?
And Obama says, well, we got that under consideration.
Merkel interrupts him and says, eine schlechte Idee.
It's a lousy, lousy idea.
So Obama goes on and says, we're going to make that decision.
And she interrupts again, she says, eine schlechte Idee.
Well, it's been the Germans that have been against that, and they're against it to this very day, arming people like Zelensky.
And the Germans, for the first time that I can remember since the war, have deliberately thumbed their nose at the American presidents from Obama through Trump to through Biden with respect to this very important Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which will be turned on, guess when?
The day before the summit in Geneva.
So, you know, the U.S., in a sort of quixotic way, tried to prevent that.
Finally, two weeks ago, they gave up on that.
I was going to ask you about that.
What was it exactly?
Because I think the hawks are accusing Biden of, oh, no, backing down on from an objective point of view.
If you think that humanity should survive at all, you got to I mean, to me, it's the peace pipeline.
Right.economically interdependent on each other, then that's a good way to keep them from going to war.
And who needs reminding that the last two times that Russia and Germany went to war, it was the worst thing that had ever happened.
Worse than Tamerlane.
Worse than Genghis or as bad as Genghis Khan or worse.
Right.
I certainly World War Two.
I don't know how many people Genghis Khan killed a lot.
But anyway, it is the worst thing that ever happened.
And certainly in anyone's memory.
And so.
Go ahead.
Well, just to interrupt here for just a second.
You know, Putin lost his big brother during World War Two.
In the siege of Leningrad, Putin was born later.
But that's an immediate tactile family thing.
The Russians lost.
Get your pencils out.
26 million people in World War Two.
How many did the US lose?
All soldiers, of course, a little over 400,000.
So 400,000 against 26 million.
You do the math.
The point here is simply that when Putin and the Russians look at the world and they remember where the Nazis came through.
One of the main axes, of course, was through Ukraine.
And they have this sort of instinctive thought that they really need to defend themselves from the likes of Zelensky.
Then you can understand a little bit better that the Russians know about war.
And Blinken, Sullivan, Biden himself.
Now here's a question for the audience.
How many draft deferments did Joe Biden have?
Good question.
Did he have as many as Dick Cheney?
Well, actually, he had exactly the same number as Dick Cheney.
Really?
You know what?
You know what?
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
I'll hold my you know what for just one second.
What I'm saying here is the obvious.
You know, when Putin looks at these guys or his advisors and say, well, these guys are not only wet behind the ears, they not only think that they're exceptional and this is a real rub, but, you know, they have absolutely no experience of war except sitting behind a console and seeing a drone knock out some wedding party in Afghanistan.
These guys are dangerous.
We have to stand up to them.
That would be the attitude that I would have if I were Putin.
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Man, I love talking with you so much.
There's so many different things.
One thing is, and I love this one, and everybody should get this book and read it, it's Bronco March Teach.
That's how he told me to say it.
It's spelled like Marcetic.
You guys know who I'm talking about.
Bronco writes for left-wing publications.
He wrote this thing called Yesterday's Man, a book about Biden.
It was like a pro-Bernie book a year ago, kind of thing.
He says in there, the first thing that Senator Biden did when he got elected, he was elected in 72, came to office in 73, and the first thing he did was criticize Nixon for his hasty and precipitous withdrawal from Vietnam.
This guy with his Dick Cheney level of draft deferments, and that's also, yes, no, really, that's how long Joe Biden goes back in the U.S. Senate, 73.
And the first thing he did, oh, you're going to create a safe haven for Osama, I mean, for the Russians.
Yeah.
Anyway, and then also, so where we were at, there was on the Nord Stream thing, and I was going to ask you, since this is the greatest invention in the history of the world, a natural gas pipeline between Germany and Russia, and that I guess Obama, I think Obama and certainly Trump were trying to halt it, and that Biden was getting criticized for backing down on his effort to stop it.
I mean, Trump had even put sanctions on Germany to try to, and I think on like a Swiss company that was doing the construction or some crazy stuff.
And then, so is that what Biden gave up on, was all efforts to intervene there?
Well, the Swiss company chickened out.
Oh, really?
They get out of the deal.
So it became Russia and Germany, pure and simple.
And if memory serves, about four weeks ago, Biden says, okay, we're not going to sanction the German manager that's running this whole issue.
We will still sanction the Russian rescue ships, the Red Crescent ships, and the other things that accompany this drilling, but we're not going to sanction the German company, not even with secondary sanctions.
And that was big, and that was just a recognition of reality and the fact that he couldn't come to Europe, where he is now, and face Angela Merkel if this thing was still hanging fire.
So yeah, it was a pretty ignominious performance.
It was a product of our exceptionalism.
If we tell the Germans what to do, they're going to do it.
And what I said before is really, it sticks in my craw.
I've been complaining that over the last 75 plus years, since the end of World War II, you could understand how the Germans and the French and the others would feel beholden to the United States.
We would feel that we had to take the lead, and they would let us take the lead.
Well, I gave many lectures in Germany, and I kept asking, when are you going to grow up?
When are you going to become like adults and look after your own interests?
And that was frowned upon.
They didn't like that at all.
Well, finally, they're acting like adults.
And I mentioned the no provision of arms to Ukraine as another burning issue.
Of course, we are sending arms to Ukraine, and some of them can be used offensively.
So the Germans are sort of growing up a little bit.
Merkel's party just won a very substantial win in Saxony in one of those state elections.
It looks like she'll do better than most people had expected.
Her party will, at least, in the, I think, September election.
So it could be that the French and the Germans will be standing up to Biden in a way that they had not done before, because who knows?
If they don't stand up now, and God forbid the clown named Trump comes back as president, which they have to recognize as a possibility, you know, they better have their loins girded and their decisions made in advance.
Yeah.
Well, so they let the Open Skies Treaty lapse.
And I saw the big headline, Putin lets the Open Skies Treaty lapse, and unsigns it, and then you read it and it says, the direct quote was, well, since the Americans have quit the treaty, I guess we have no choice but to unsign it ourselves now.
Thanks a lot, Joe.
That was really an interesting thing, Scott, because that would have been a cheap, a really cheap, actually a mutually advantageous gift to say, look, Trump wanted to get out of this treaty.
You kept your plans in order.
We have to, we're getting back in.
Now, that treaty allowed both sides to overfly the countries of others and verify things in a kind of unobtrusive way, where they would be notified ahead of time or not given a lot of private notice.
But that would be the kind of intelligence that could be shared widely, not the very sensitive stuff that comes from imagery from satellites.
So why didn't they just say, well, you know, as a gesture of goodwill here, we're getting back in this, it would have cost nothing.
So that militates on the side of people like Victoria Nuland, who don't want to give any quarter, who want to make sure that there's no real avenue for rapprochement, much less détente.
And, you know, there are two sides to this thing.
I hope I'm right in predicting that there's unlikely to be a Donnybrook, at least in public in Geneva on the 16th, but it's not all that clear.
And the tea leaves, well, the tea leaves are very weak, make very weak tea.
All right.
So now we talked earlier about Sullivan and Blinken blinking, which that's good because neither of them are tough guys.
And so, you know, push them around a little bit, they back down.
I like that.
But then you also make a big deal about the presence of the current CIA director, William Burns.
Why should I, you know, think he's any better than Nicholas Burns, right?
Oh, by the way, for people who don't know, Nicholas Burns was one of George Bush's henchmen, horrible murderer.
Go ahead.
Well, their records make it clear that they're very different characters.
Bill Burns knows a lot about the world.
He's widely respected.
You know, this is a trite expression, but I know people who are honest.
I know people who worked in the State Department and the intelligence community in an honest way.
And they say that Burns is a straight shooter.
More important, he was ambassador to Russia, OK?
And I mentioned before that he was read the riot act by none less than Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who had just really come into his position as foreign minister in 2008.
The date was February 1.
Bill Burns gets this call.
The foreign minister wants to see you as soon as you can get over here.
Burns goes into the foreign ministry, Lavrov comes in the room and he says, Mr. Burns, do you know what net means?
And Burns said, oh, yeah, I think so.
Well, net means net.
NATO incorporating Ukraine and Georgia is a red line for us.
Tell your secretary of state net means net.
We will not allow it.
Well, Burns reports that back straight.
He even says to Condoleezza Rice, you know, the Russians have strategic interests, too.
OK, wow.
That's a gutsy thing to say to the secretary of state, at least that particular one.
So that's February 1.
What happens on April 3rd?
There's a big NATO summit in Bucharest.
This is again 2008.
And NATO in its final declaration, April 3rd, 2008, says Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO, quote, unquote.
So two months later, after Lavrov's warning, that's what happens.
OK.
Now, why do I say all that?
Well, I say that because that's the first time I've ever seen the Russian, the falling Russian for half a century now, use the word the red line.
This is their red line.
And what Lavrov said and what Bill Burns reported was that, look, we don't want to have to invade Ukraine.
There will be real trouble if you try to do NATO.
Don't do it.
OK.
So that's the background.
Now, why do I mention that now?
Well, Bill Burns is now the director of the CIA.
Not only that, but there has been some sensible language inserted into this so-called threat assessment, which was issued in early April of this year.
And it talks about, well, it talks about the Russians having their own interests, the Russians thinking that we're trying to take them over, the Russians thinking that we're trying to chip away at the old republics of the Soviet Union, take them over like Ukraine.
Well, that's unprecedented language.
That shows that, in my view, it's a guess, but Burns is the only guy that could make this happen, that if if Biden wants a sensible experience, not what behind the ears adviser, he'll take Bill Burns along or at least have him on the red line to give him guidance as to how to deal with these issues, because, well, unlike Nicholas Burns, Bill Burns knows which side is up.
Yeah.
Well, that's good to hear.
I mean, I'm sure the guy murders people every day, a CIA director.
So but it's nice to know that he knows what yet means.
And for people who don't understand, I guess, is it a fair parallel to say, you know, if Reagan had blown so much money in the 80s that the American empire fell apart and the Soviets came out dominant and expanded the Warsaw Pact into the Caribbean and Latin America, and now they were trying to incorporate Canada, is that basically, you know, sort of parallel?
Because I think we know what the Americans would do if the Russians were overthrown the government in Canada and using, you know, crazies to do it, starting a civil war and all this stuff.
Well, you know, I was just entering on active duty with the army in 1962 when the Cuban missile crisis happened.
So we know how the US reacted then.
Thank goodness Kennedy was smart enough to talk to Khrushchev and they worked it out without having having it be the end of all of us.
Maybe a more applicable parallel would be, you know, with the with the coup in Kiev in February 2014, just let's suppose that in Mexico there was a coup and that the Mexican government allied itself with a hostile sort of Warsaw Pact alliance and started moving troops toward toward the US, claiming that, oh, wait a second, in the middle of 19th century, you are next.
This territory called Texas and, you know, we're going to take it back now and we're going to use military means.
Well, there's there's an analogy.
What would the United States do?
The Mexicans wouldn't last very long.
Right.
So, you know, it's a matter of balance.
It's a matter of one country having had the experience that we had with Cuba, Russians now have with Kiev.
It's it applies to both sides.
The strategic realities are such that you don't do coups in adjacent, contiguous countries.
Yeah.
And, you know, I had conflated these two things before the WikiLeaks.
And thank you, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange for that, again, by the way, the State Department cables there, then yet means yet.
And I can play to that with the other thing.
What it really was, was it was a statement that Putin made to an Italian.
I don't know if it was a foreign minister, but a high level Italian official that he said, listen, you know, we could be in Kiev in two weeks.
Yeah.
Well, right after the coup, Putin also said at a major, major meeting, Do you want a war in Ukraine?
We will not allow it.
We will not allow it.
Now, позволим is a lot stronger than allow or permit.
It means that we're not going to stand for it.
You know, American statesmen should know that anybody with a taste of history should know that.
And I think you have to say that the Newlands of this world do know that.
But they want to give the Russians a bloody nose anyway to paint them in the blackest colors as aggressors, as people who invade other countries.
And that's not the right story at all.
But most Americans sadly believe that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, at least on the right, there's sort of a partisan reaction against that narrative because it was such a giant false smear against Donald Trump, their great leader.
So and which was and and ladies and gentlemen, Ray McGovern was absolutely among the best on Russiagate debunking it in all aspects from the very beginning.
If you didn't already know that, not that he's a Trump partisan in any way, but just a truth partisan and especially a truth about Russia partisan.
And that whole hoax, you know, in a way probably helped as it, you know, terribly poisoned liberals against Russia.
It probably was pretty good for helping right wingers maybe see through some of these narratives that, you know what?
I don't know.
You guys say lots of things about Vladimir Putin and your batting average ain't that high.
So what the hell, you know?
And then on the reality of it, like we're talking about, they expanded NATO all the way into Eastern Europe.
They've been for, you know, going on 20 years now, threatening to bring Georgia and Ukraine in.
And you have Carl Gershman, who I understand, I think Ray is only recently no longer the head of the NED, but who is the head of the NED from since the Reagan years.
Right.
The National Endowment for Democracy, who had written that thing in The Washington Post in, I guess it would have been October of 2013, right before the protest movement that culminated in the coup in Ukraine began saying that, well, Vladimir Putin doesn't like the way that we're doing things.
Maybe he'll find himself on the other end of one of these revolutions, too, real soon.
A direct threat to overthrow the government in Ukraine.
See, this is the thing about it, right?
There's got to be some.
OK, you talk about your this guy, William Burns, that you respect.
There's got to be enough William Burnses in the country to get it through to these people somehow that, I mean, how could they even be considering that to think that they could?
You know, now being happy to see Yeltsin come out on top as the Soviet Union falls.
OK, that's one thing.
But installing a Yeltsin in Russia without provoking a war in the attempt, that is absolutely stupid and crazy.
And yet, yeah, no, the guy really wrote that in The Washington Post, right?
I mean, and that's representative of the thinking of a lot of these people that the Cold War ain't over until America, what, breaks Russia into 100 pieces?
Well, it has a tone of unreality to you and me.
But H-bomb, I mean, that's it.
H-bomb.
They have H-bombs.
So you can't.
I don't know what else to discuss.
What other point is there to make other than they can make your city no longer exist, the whole thing in one shot?
So that's it.
Well, we have this Air Force.
Actually, he's a Navy admiral in charge of STRATCOM now, who used to be SAC, the Strategic Air Command.
And he's talking blithely.
He's talking nonchalantly about using nuclear weapons, if we have to, in a way that hasn't been uttered by a four-star in decades, as far as I can remember.
Now, why can't Biden just shut this guy up and say, look, you know, we're not going to use nuclear weapons?
As Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed, nobody can win a nuclear war.
So shut the hell up.
I can't even do that.
So this is one thing that if it becomes pretty acerbic, I would fully expect Putin, maybe just one on one with interpreters, to say, look, are you realistically considering using nuclear weapons?
And if so, tell me about it.
And if not, why don't you shut that guy up?
Are you powerless to stop these kinds of people?
Because that speaks volumes to us Russians.
That's how it could come down in these more private exchanges.
And I would fully expect, you know, Putin to ask odd questions or impolite questions like, President Biden, do you share the view of Representative Jason Crow, also a Democrat?
He says that I, Vladimir Putin, I wake up every morning and I go to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy, quote unquote.
Do you believe?
And what does Pelosi mean when she keeps saying all roads lead to Putin?
And how about Hillary Clinton?
Does she really think that I was giving Trump instructions on January 6th as to how to conduct this insurrection?
Come on, Mr. Putin.
I mean, Mr. Biden, do you believe all that stuff or do you not?
And if you don't, why don't you, why don't you inject a degree of realism so American people won't be holding hostage to improvement in relations between our two countries?
Yeah.
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All right.
So to wrap up here, Ray, real quick, or not that quick, I don't know.
You say whatever you want.
Talk again about this Mickey Matt here, the special interests involved in this.
Because even though you did talk about that before, and it's brought up, and it's always in the background of this, still so much of the discussion, because we're talking about the political leaders of each side, the language takes the form of this nation state's interests versus that nation state's interests.
But then it's obvious that you and I agree that none of this is in our interest as the American people in any way, really.
Maybe some people could believe in that.
But that's not where this really comes from, right?
A real belief that to protect the American people, the American government must dominate all of Eurasia forever.
It's not really about protecting us.
It's about something else.
It is.
And, you know, to draw an analogy to what's going on today, think back to the Donnybrook, think back to the awful event in Anchorage, where Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan talked down to the Chinese in what the Chinese call the condescending way, as if they really had a position of strength or power.
That was a debacle by any measurement, except there was no debacle for the Mickey Matt, for the military, industrial, congressional, intelligence, media, academia, think tank complex, building more ships, fielding them or putting them in the water against China.
Man, this was a windfall.
The companies, the corporations that profiteer on war, Anchorage was the best thing that could have happened.
And why do I say that now?
I say that now that the same forces were at work prior to the summit on the 16th in Geneva, and it could well be that they will prevail again and there will be this acerbic exchange, which when Biden comes back home, he'll say, well, now do you see why I have to increase the defense budget still more?
Why do we have to build AVMs that don't work, but we build them anyway?
So this is in the background.
Um, the point I would like to just add here is, is that when Eisenhower, to his great credit, identified the military industrial complex, he said that this was aggregating power, whether it was doing that intentionally or not, but this was a main threat.
And he said the only antidote to this, and this is my point, the only way to prevent this from achieving its, its power aims is an enlightened and educated and informed American populace.
That's where media in the midst of Mickey Matt comes in.
Our populace is very poorly informed.
It thinks that these boogeymen, China and Russia are real threats to us, whereas they are not real threats to us, but they quote, justify, end quote, giving 60 cents of every dollar we pay in taxes over to these very rich CEOs who are making $10 million a year.
So that's where it comes down.
These people are very, very powerful.
The people that Ashton Carter represented back there about Syria, those are people that are running things here.
And Putin knows that.
And so his expectations are limited.
But as he says, this will be a good step, even though it will be limited to first encounter where we can size each other up.
That indeed is a positive aspect to this.
And I believe that will be the main, the main, the main success here.
And I would, I would like it if Putin, if Putin and Biden were able to get together unter vier Augen, as the Germans say, under four eyes, that is eye to eye, and have a frank discussion with only an interpreter there.
Because when that happens, things can, can improve.
I'm not saying I would advocate that for Trump, but for Biden, I would.
And the proof in the pudding is that when Obama and Putin got together in early September of 2013, when Obama was under great pressure from all his advisors to strike out overtly with missiles against Syria, on the pretext that they did a chemical strike near, near Damascus, Putin was able to persuade Obama, you don't have to do that.
We'll get those Syrian chemical weapons destroyed under UN supervision on a US ship outfitted to destroy such weapons.
What do you think, Mr. President?
Guess what?
They were unter vier Augen.
They were under four, it was eye to eye.
John Kerry was not around, nor was the military industrial complex or its later derivative.
And so Biden said, this is a very good idea.
And that happened.
So that was the last part of trust that was built up.
They trusted each other.
And they trusted each other mostly because John Kerry had been kept out of this.
Now, where was he?
He was traveling elsewhere.
But four days, and this is important, four days after Putin and Biden agreed to avoid war by letting the Syrian weapons be destroyed, Kerry was in London.
And at a press conference, he said, oh, it's terrible.
These Syrians, they're awful.
They do chemical warfare.
We have, you know, that's a red line for us.
And somebody asked, last question, is there nothing that Syria can do to avoid an attack?
And Kerry says in a very dismissive way, well, I suppose they could destroy their chemical weapons, but that's not going to happen.
I mean, they're not going to do that.
On the way home later that day, Kerry gets a telephone call from the White House.
Mr. Secretary, the president would like to see you tomorrow morning as soon as he can.
He has something to tell you.
And it has to do with an agreement to have all the Syrian chemical weapons destroyed.
Sorry, you don't remember about that.
But we put that in train back in Northern Ireland at the summit in June.
It's going to happen.
And he wants you not to be blindsided by the press about this.
So Kerry sees Obama the next morning.
And Obama says, John, thanks for all your efforts.
I worked this out personally with Putin.
Now go back to Geneva, finish this agreement.
We don't have to do a war, John.
We can avoid war this time.
Now, the neocons, Kerry, everybody else was up in arms.
Obama chickened out.
We didn't get our war.
We didn't get our overt war against Syria.
It was quite an escapade.
What I'm saying here is that it's not always a bad idea to keep people like Blinken or Sullivan or other unwashed people out of these discussions and let Biden experience for himself what it's like to deal with a person who I would say is a statesman.
And I'll go on record as saying Putin is a statesman.
And Biden might be able to realize that were he able to size him up.
And even, isn't it true, Ray, that in the battle days of the Soviet Union there, that this is what really finally broke the ice was Reagan shook hands with Gorbachev and said, I think I could probably deal with this guy as opposed to the last few guys who had been from the older generation and that much harder to communicate with.
I'm glad you mentioned that, Scott, because that took a lot of doing.
And by the way, like in his first term, Reagan came in and was a big hawk and said, let's put new missiles in Europe and all this brinksmanship.
I know Democrats around where I was from were worried.
And then he's the one who really began the negotiations to end the Cold War.
Yeah, the rest of the story is that George Shultz, an excellent statesman, a fellow with his head screwed on right, was able to face down Casper Weinberger at defense, Bill Casey at CIA, various national security advisors and persuade Reagan, look, Gorbachev is the real deal.
I think you can deal with him.
So my hat goes off to George Shultz.
And I would mention in passing that I used to brief George Shultz every other morning during the first four years of Reagan's tenure.
I know what he was up against.
I know that he asked me what I really thought, whether I agreed with Casey and Gates.
And I told him I don't always agree with them.
He knew where I stood and he knew where responsible people stood.
So it was he, Shultz, pretty much single handedly that took Reagan by the arm and said, look, Ronnie or Mr. President, I think we'll deal with these people.
Now, fast forward one year after I stopped briefing them, 1986 in Reykjavik, my God, Khrushchev proposes, let's do away with all nuclear weapons.
Gorbachev.
My God, Gorbachev here, I'm sorry.
I get my Soviet leaders mixed up.
Yeah, Gorbachev proposes a complete abolition of nuclear weapons.
And Reagan said, my God, do you think we could do that?
And oh, sounds good.
Let me talk to my advisors.
He comes back and he talks to his advisors, many of them like Ashton Carter, deep in the defense industries.
Fritz Ehrmarth comes to mind, a guy who worked for the CIA ostensibly, but really for Lockheed Raytheon and the rest of them.
And they say very cleverly, Mr. President, that would put the kibosh on Star Wars.
Your project for impenetrable defense system is just taking shape.
It's going to be possible.
We can do it.
But if you agree on this stuff, we'll never have a defense shield.
Yeah, but if we get rid of the nukes, we don't need one.
Yeah, well, yeah, that's why we're going to get it.
So you can't trust the Russians also.
That's the second sentence.
Now, that was it.
Real scientists were telling us that you can never, ever, ever create an impenetrable shield against incoming missiles.
It'll never work, no matter how much money you throw at it.
And Putin has proved that now by these hypersonic missiles and other things that he's advertised.
So there was a major, major thing that fell apart on the cross of these military industrial folks who wanted to build ABM systems and wanted Ronald Reagan to believe that he could create an impenetrable.
Now, if you're a naive actor from California and you're told that you can create an impenetrable umbrella over the United States, you know, you might believe them, especially if you're a defense secretary and you're a CIA guy and everybody else, your national security advisors are telling you can.
In that case, Schultz lost out.
And that was a terrible missed opportunity.
I watched it go down because they had me come back to my old position there and report on what went on in Reykjavik.
It was it was awful.
It was just really awful.
But they did rebound and create a sensible way to deal with things.
George H.W. Bush, when he came in, he, of course, acted very responsibly when the Berlin Wall fell.
He immediately called Gorbachev and said, look, Mike, Michael, sorry for your troubles, but we're not going to dance on the Berlin Wall.
We're not going to take advantage of your troubles in Eastern Europe.
And as you know, James Baker, his secretary of state, later promised not to move NATO one inch further east as a deal where Russia would accept a reunified Germany.
That was big and that was reneged upon by Bill Clinton.
And now there are more and more countries in NATO actually exactly.
Well, I think there were 16 at the time.
Now I think there are 30, 31.
So virtually doubled in size.
And all those new countries, guess where they are?
They're several inches to the east of the East German border.
So when the Russians talk about trust, well, they've got a lot of mistrust and it's not all conjured up.
It's not synthetic.
And by the way, you know, in the alternate history here, I mean, it sounds impossible.
But as you say, that was the proposal.
And Reagan took it seriously at first to completely disarm America and the Soviet Union of all nukes, short, long range, medium range submarines, everything, all of them, no nukes.
And then that would mean, of course, and because both countries were already members of the nonproliferation treaty where they already promised to disarm their nukes anyway, which, of course, there's no one to enforce it on them.
So they don't.
But if they had gone along, then that would mean also that, of course, they would be in the position to pressure Britain and France and China and Israel and India and Pakistan.
And at that time, I guess, South Africa, you guys are going to give up your nukes, too, if we are.
And then they would have.
Because who could resist that, even if America had no more nukes or was in the process of disarming them?
If the Americans and the Soviets were saying we are really getting rid of ours and you are, too, the rest of the world would have had to essentially go along with that, right?
Yeah, the only people that wouldn't be happy, and this is the cardinal point here, would be the military-industrial complex that Ike talked about.
And Americans don't know enough about that to realize that informed citizenship, citizenry, is the only thing that can prevent these abuses.
And I've never seen it quite worse.
I've never seen more profiteering.
And, you know, I hate to quote the Pope because I don't believe, I don't agree with a lot of what it says, but he was dead right five or six years ago when he came to Congress and he said, and I quote, the major problem is the blood-drenched arms traders, period, end quote.
That's exactly, I remember watching the congressmen and senators, they all go, oh, yeah, applauded, and then they looked in their vestibules to see if that envelope from Raytheon was still there and the one from Lockheed over here, you know.
It was giving hypocrisy a bad name.
And that didn't make headlines, right?
The New York Times did not have above the fold top of the headline, Pope calls out blood-drenched warmongers in Congress, with a big picture of them at the lectern or anything like that, which you might have thought that that would be a big deal, but yeah.
Maybe not.
Right, you got that right.
And by the way, so next week, there was a problem, I couldn't get him on the show today, but next week, I'm going to talk again with the great William Hartung, who I'm sure you probably know, who has done this piece just recently, specifically about the H-bomb lobby.
And this is something that we've covered on the show before, where it's no different than any other group of lobbyists in the country.
And maybe even worse, you have the, I forgot the exact term for it, but you have essentially what is, you know, unashamedly self-referred to as the nuclear caucus, the nuclear lobby, you know, group.
And it's a group of senators, a caucus of senators from the states where the nuclear weapons are stationed.
And they just get paid, they just get outright bribed to keep it that way.
Yeah.
You know, Scott, Hartung is terrific.
I'm glad you're having him on.
If you could persuade him to talk about what they call opportunity costs, okay?
Let's take these states where the senators are in this lobby.
What could X billion dollars do for their school system, for their social programs, for more constructive uses?
That's what we need to give to the American people.
Look, you know, building F-35 fighters that don't work, that cost X amount of money.
And for that amount of money, these three states in the Midwest could have free education for everybody, could have free health care and blah, blah, blah, blah.
That's what needs to get through the American people.
It can't be all conceptual, can't be all intellectual.
Well, and it doesn't have to all be government handouts either.
All that money could have gone into investments in factories that make useful things that add to people's standard of living instead of this complete waste.
Because, you know, absolutely, that's the case, right?
It's not just the $7 trillion they wasted.
It's what could have been created with the seven—oh, it's a lot more than seven, but—well, in the last 20 years, the $20 trillion they wasted could have created, you know, who knows how many more tens of trillions of dollars worth of wealth if properly invested in useful things for people.
So, yeah, it's absolutely right.
It's completely crazy.
And then, you know, I've been talking with this guy, Tom Colina, every once in a while, who's an expert on nuclear weapons and co-wrote a piece with William Perry and this kind of thing.
And one of his, you know, subjects that he always talks about is the concept of the nuclear sponge and how they deliberately place all these Minuteman missiles in their silos in the, you know, northern middle states, you know, the Dakotas and Wyoming and I guess even as far south as Colorado and Nebraska.
And then the purpose of these nukes is to draw Russian fire.
And the purpose of the nukes is not to use them to kill Russians with.
It's to force the Russians to have to commit all of these extra nuclear forces to bombing the middle of the country in order to spare the coasts.
Which, of course, would all get nuked anyway in a full scale war with the Soviet Union, like what the Eastern Seaboard would be spared because they're too busy nuking Nebraska.
That's ridiculous.
But they do.
That's the policy anyway, is to deliberately draw hydrogen bomb fire to the citizenry of the country.
Yeah, those senators know that, you know, tell those senators.
And don't forget Montana, you know.
Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.
These guys don't really, they live in a different world, as long as their envelopes keep getting filled by Raytheon and Lockheed and Boeing and all these big defense contractors.
They don't give a rat's patootie about the strategic equation.
And they find it just as convenient not to not to learn about it, much less care about it.
So people like Bill Hartung are golden.
And I wish you wish you well with that interview.
Yeah, well, I sure had good luck with this one.
Thank you so much for coming on the show, Ray.
You're great as always.
Well, you're most welcome, Scott.
And good luck to you.
All right, you guys.
That's the heroic Ray McGovern.
He's at antiwar.com.
Of course, the latest is called Biden Putin summit boon or bust.
The Scott Horton Show antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APS radio.com, antiwar.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.
