All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
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 scotthortonshow.
Hey, you guys, introducing James Carden from the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord.
They changed the name so that they could make a cool acronym out of it, ACCCRA.
And the point being that instead of having a cold war and then maybe a really, really, really hot war with Russia, we should get along instead.
Welcome back.
How you doing, James?
I'm good.
And fortunately, we haven't gotten sued from the car company yet.
That's very good to know.
Maybe you can get them to sponsor your efforts, you know?
That would be nice.
That'd be a nice change.
Russia's a big market there, you know?
Yeah.
Right.
Instead of exploding people.
Yeah.
Anyway.
What a concept.
Yeah.
Hey, listen, so we got this new thing, AUKUS, speaking of weird acronyms.
And this is the new alliance between the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.
And well, just as an aside, I wanted to point out, I don't know if you ever saw this, but there's a great clip of John Mearsheimer giving a speech in Australia that Caitlin Johnstone tweeted out last week.
And Mearsheimer is saying, you better line up with us or you guys are in big trouble.
And we'll never forget it.
And if you don't line up with us, then that's the same as the line with China against us.
And you'll make an enemy out of us and all these things.
And so Johnstone says, listen, Australia is not joining up with the U.S. to protect itself from China.
Australia is joining up with the U.S. to protect itself from the U.S.
And which sure seemed right to me.
So then that means as part of that, they have joined up this new alliance or a renewed alliance, I guess, with the United States and Britain.
And at the expense of the French, who were lined up to sell some submarines to Australia And I guess right before the deal was to go through, they made this change.
And then the change comes with the Australians buying nuclear powered submarines from the United States instead of the French.
So that's the background.
But then you've got this great piece here at USRussiaAccord.org about the silver lining that, hey, great tensions inside NATO, right?
Do you see this to be productive toward ending America's European empire?
Well, that's sort of the hope.
I speculate that Macron's anger over the deal of being betrayed by his Australian partners and being really kept in the dark by the U.S. and U.K. will have him rethink and enact on his often expressed reservations about the NATO alliance.
Macron is a rare figure in the West in that he actually seems inclined not to go with the talking points with regard to NATO.
And he has previously described the alliance as having experienced brain death, among other things.
And Macron's views on NATO are not dissimilar to those of his presidential model in France.
And that would be President Charles de Gaulle, who was such a critic of NATO that he threw all of the NATO forces out of his country in the mid-60s.
One would hope that this incident, as embarrassing as it was to the French, that perhaps it will spur Macron to rethink the value of that alliance, which is long outlived its sell-by date, if you will.
Yeah.
Got that right.
Well, so let me ask you this.
When France was selling these subs to the Australians, was there a narrative that, yeah, this is to protect you in the new Cold War with China?
Or just, hey, you guys want to buy some submarines and we'll do a deal, but without the kind of global foreign policy kind of thing going on, too?
Yeah, it didn't seem to me that they were selling submarines and a military alliance designed to encircle and isolate China.
But it seems as though the UK and American subs did come with those strings very much attached.
And so the press conference that was held between Australian Prime Minister Scott Morris and the buffoonish Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, and our own America's granddad, Joseph Biden, the theme of the announcement really was this new so-called strategic alliance in the Indo-Pacific.
And I might be mistaken about this.
I'm not sure that they actually said the word China during the rollout, but clearly that's what it is aimed for.
And I'm glad that you brought up John Mearsheimer at the top, because his book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, ends with a long discussion of the rise of China.
And in a nutshell, Mearsheimer, who is always worth listening to, posits that China's rise will not and cannot be peaceful.
Not so much because they have designs on world domination, but he fears America's reaction to it far more than what the Chinese are actually up to.
So he really pens that if it's not going to rise peacefully, his thesis is that it's going to be because of the overreaction in Washington.
And I think that the creation of AUKUS is bearing that out.
So in other words, that clip of his speech, he's basically saying that America is such an irrational and dangerous creature.
You Australians should help me calm it down by joining its alliance now so that it doesn't feel so insecure about China to maybe help to keep the peace rather than make matters worse.
Yeah, I think that's the way I would read it.
I hadn't heard or seen that clip before.
I mean, he's being pretty harsh in that clip, but I could see how it, you know, it's not the whole context.
I haven't seen the whole speech.
But in a way, the way he's talking, he's speaking for the United States of America.
But that could be just like a rhetorical thing rather than, you know, really just saying you boys better fall in line because I say so on behalf of the U.S. kind of thing, you know.
But I could see what you mean.
Now, well, it's interesting, too, and I wonder about whether you hear much of this about all of China's problems.
I mean, they're building up their naval power in the South China Sea and all of this.
But, you know, they have all kinds of economic problems, as we're seeing right now with the beginning of the collapse of their housing market and things like this.
And, you know, I already knew this, but I hadn't really thought about it in this way.
I keep bringing this up.
I did a panel discussion that was hosted or whatever, moderated by Grover Norquist at Freedom Fest a couple of months ago.
And he rattled off all of the countries on China's border or, you know, surrounding them right near them, you know, Korea, Japan, Vietnam and well, Taiwan, for that matter, Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia and Thailand and India and Pakistan and Russia.
And I'm probably leaving out a couple.
You know, we have Canada and Mexico and water.
They've got like 10 countries on their border, eight countries or something on their border that they have to have a separate foreign policy for each one to try to figure out, you know, how to balance all these interests.
And as I rattle all those names off, if I were to ask you which one of those countries is Taiwan or is China going to invade and conquer, Taiwan is probably the only one.
Right.
Oh, I left out Outer Mongolia.
Like, nobody thinks they're going to roll into the stands in Central Asia.
Nobody thinks they're going to invade Japan or Korea or Vietnam or any of these things.
They might take Taiwan, which would be, you know, a huge flashpoint in danger of war.
But it seems to me like the whole dangerous rise of China in the first place is vastly overblown.
It's sort of like based on the presumption that they're going to continue with the exact same level of growth that they've had since 1990 to now forever without problems or something.
And that they share America's ambitions for global dominance, for that matter.
Right.
Well, that's the key.
I mean, you were saying that no one really believes that, you know, China is set to roll through the stands.
I'm fairly certain that we could find some maniacs on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington where all the think tanks are located and find a bunch of people who actually believe that or making their living on pretending that China is some sort of military, military threat in the region.
Just as a lot of these people have made their careers on pretending that the Russians are about to roll through Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland and the rest of it.
So there is this kind of conflation with their economic rise and their supposed geopolitical designs.
These people seem to forget that China has one foreign military base, right?
We have roughly 750 by some estimates, maybe even 800 military bases worldwide.
They have one and it is in Djibouti.
So you know, the arguments are, I find them fairly unpersuasive, which isn't to say that the Chinese are not bad actors in certain discrete areas.
They are, but the kind of containment 2.0 new Cold War approach towards China, it seems silly because it depends upon the cooperation of a lot of those countries that you just named taking part, those countries on China's border.
The problem is that those very same countries do the vast amount of trade with China, right?
So it would be sort of an unprecedented historical occurrence where you have a country reliant on, you know, you have a country like Vietnam that is almost completely reliant on trade with China, but then they're going to decide to join a military alliance aimed against China, right?
It doesn't seem like it's been really well, well thought out, but that isn't surprising given Washington's proclivity not to think things out.
Right.
All right.
Sorry.
Hang on a second.
Important business here.
I was telling my friend, man, you drink too much.
You know, it's causing all these other problems.
Just smoke weed instead.
It's way better for you.
And now you can get good smoke in the mail.
And it's totally legal.
It's just about everywhere in America.
It turns out there's a cannabinoid isomer called Delta eight, which is perfectly legal and still gives you that nice little old reverse headache kind of feeling you're used to getting from your guy.
Check it out at the hemp spot.com, but spelled the THC, the hemp spot.com.
Now double check into the legality in your state, but you should be good.
The hemp spot.com is shipping everywhere in America and during their grand opening through July use coupon code Horton and get 30% off and a 10% commission will be paid to the Scott Horton show for every order using that coupon code and free shipping on any order over $90.
It's your Delta eight THC cannabis at the hemp spot.com, but write THC for the, Hey guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, the war state.
It's about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite after world war two, during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jack Kennedy.
It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's road to world empire.
The war state by Mike Swanson, find it in the right hand margin at scotthorton.org.
You know, it's funny too.
I mean, I guess if you start out with the premise of paranoia, then you go, Oh no, the belt and road initiative, China is going to conquer all of Eurasia.
They're going to take their million man army and they're just going to march it West and they're going to end up ruling all the way from Shanghai to Lisbon or whatever.
That's the plan for the road, but it seems like, I mean, geez, if you just look at a map of the world or a globe with the proper proportions and everything, China's huge, but it's still only what, like a eighth of Eurasia or a fifth of it or something like that.
That's a lot of Eurasia to conquer if you're China.
And it seems like if you really want to build a road and a high, you know, a railway and a fiber optic line and everything all the way from Shanghai to Lisbon, that you're going to have to kiss everybody's ass all the way to Portugal rather than threatening them and pointing rifles at them.
That's a lot of road to secure, man.
You're going to need friends to help keep the peace on your road or else, you know, who's going to protect the quickie marts on the side of the road from the highway robbers, you know?
Well, right.
I mean, their foreign policy seems to be based more on soft power and more on economics into dependence theory, right?
They seem to believe that the more trade that they do with countries, the better their relations will be.
And perhaps the more leverage they have, they don't really seem to buy into this Anglo-American tradition of hard power, military invasion, regime change above all.
And you know, this strategy of isolating them and containing them is in the process of backfiring fairly spectacularly because the policy of containing and isolating and making into a pariah state, the Russian Federation has driven the Russians into the arms of the Chinese.
And these are historically adversarial states.
And now with the dual containment policy, what we're in the process of making is a very solid alliance, a pragmatic one, between Russia and China.
And I'm not sure that that's something that will read down to our benefit.
Yeah, I mean, this is something I remember talking about with Chalmers Johnson back 15 years ago or something was, here the Europeans were, you know, launching this giant weapons sale, you know, a whole program of weapons sales to China.
And Chalmers Johnson said, you know, in the Cold War, this was our ultimate nightmare would be a, you know, Paris-Berlin-Moscow-Beijing axis, right?
This is the worst thing that could possibly happen.
Now this is what we're doing with, you know, the American and Anglo alliance essentially attacking Iraq in the way that they were doing then.
And the way Rumsfeld was, you know, alienating old Europe in favor of new Europe, as he called it there.
They, you know, promoting the East over the old West.
And I mean, certainly the Sino-Soviet split and its exploitation by Nixon back 50 years ago was regarded as this brilliant achievement, right?
But you know, the foreign policy establishment had mistakenly, accidentally on purpose, continued to believe that Beijing and Moscow were eye to eye on everything for all of that time since Mao had taken power when it really wasn't true.
And all it took was a little bit of creativity on Kissinger's part, and they were able to not just exploit, but really accentuate that split between Russia and China.
And it seems like now in their arrogance, essentially, they're just pushing them all back together again.
Well, forget the Europeans for now, but especially the Russians and the Chinese.
When if you asked Henry Kissinger, we should be choosing one over the other to balance against the other, right?
There was even at one point Trump said, you know, I went and talked to Henry Kissinger and he told me that we should be leaning toward Russia to balance against China right now.
And then everyone decided, no, Trump is a secret, you know, FSB spy is the far more likely explanation for him saying nice things about Russia.
When really that was what he was being told by, you know, the grayest of graybeards is that we should not be, you know, hyping up our Cold War against both at the same time.
Because the last thing in the world we want is for them to put aside all differences and join back together again against us.
Which I got to say, I don't care either way, but you know what I mean.
Right.
Right.
I mean, that's right.
So that's the danger of the dual containment policy that Washington insists on, regardless of party, they insist on following.
And there are very few voices here, maybe outside of, I don't know, Rand Paul, perhaps on the right and then on the left, someone like Ro Khanna and Barbara Lee, who are realistic enough and perhaps, you know, wise enough to be warning against this pursuit of a new Cold War, a two front Cold War.
That seems to be all the rage right now in Washington.
And by the way, I should be clear, when I say I don't care, it's because they're not coming here.
Right.
If they ally against us, all that would mean is they'd be limiting our government's influence in the old world, which I don't object to, because America shouldn't have any influence in the old world anyway.
So that's all I'm saying there.
Not that they're a real threat.
If it came to a war, then yeah, I'm on America's side.
But you know what I mean.
Right.
No, I mean, it goes back again to Mearsheimer, right?
Mearsheimer's thesis is that China's goal really is to become a regional hegemon, right?
And that the United States, for whatever reason, reasons of ideology mainly, I think, will not allow that to happen.
But I don't see any real reason why we shouldn't.
We're obviously, for the past 30 years, we've been trying to become a global hegemon, but that has proved to be utterly impossible.
But we certainly, in the absence of that, will always be the regional hegemon.
And the European Union and Russia right now are in a competition, and the United States is deeply involved in this competition.
So you will be the regional hegemon there, and obviously China's going to emerge as its own regional leader.
And there should be very, multi-polarity where you have a world with different spheres of influence and different poles should not be something that we are, that we should be afraid of.
But it terrifies all those people who I mentioned earlier on Massachusetts Avenue in Northwest Washington.
They still have these unipolar pretensions that date back to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.
Now, so back to NATO here real quick.
You know, I'm sure you saw this.
We probably talked about it at the time, last November, where the New York Times ran this story about how at NATO they did this big study about how after losing the Afghan war, which was, as I quote them in my book, saying, this is a team-building exercise for NATO.
It's one of the main reasons to have an Afghan war, is it's something we can do together.
We call it international greatness.
But now that that's over, they go, oh, no, we need a new sacred mission, right?
Joe Biden says our commitment to NATO is sacred.
And at the same time that they say we don't have a reason to exist.
And so they launched a big study group, probably spent millions of American tax dollars studying What should be the new purpose for NATO?
Because I guess they can't get the Germans and the French to even pretend to believe that the Russians are coming at all.
And so, according to the New York Times, shifting focus, NATO views China as global security challenge for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Well, it's a, you know, it's obviously absurd and the organization is experiencing not only brain death, as Emmanuel Macron has pointed out, it's severely overextended.
And so, you know, one recalls Walter Lippmann's warning about alliances that, you know, they're like a chain.
They're only as strong as their weakest link.
Well, if that's true, then it's not much of a security alliance at all if we're dead set on bringing in countries like Montenegro into it.
So NATO is really, opposes severe national security threat to the United States because it empowers states to try to attempt to punch above their weight and it empowers them to act recklessly and provocatively.
And we've seen that with states who aren't members, but who have even, who've been merely, you know, promised membership.
Here I am in mind.
And that goes for America too, right?
The Americans act as though they have all of Europe with them when they really don't.
If it came to a real war with Russia, they would all sit it out.
Oh, certainly.
You know, except maybe in the Baltics where they'd get the worst of it or something, but.
Right.
So again, so the strategy, the NATO strategy has not been working for roughly 30 years.
I don't see any reason why we would try to duplicate that strategy in the so-called Indo-Pacific region.
But that's what the Biden administration seems intent on doing.
Yeah.
Now, so what kind of trouble do you think that they've really caused with the French here?
Do you think it's going to help to undermine the alliance?
I'm sort of not that hopeful.
So no, I don't.
I don't.
I think, you know, it's going to, it's obviously caused some friction in the relationship.
It could, it might empower Macron to do so.
It might spur him to rethink the wisdom of being part of this outdated, overextended, rather dangerous enterprise called NATO.
You know, will he do it?
I don't, I don't know.
I know that his principal opponent in the forthcoming election this spring, Marie Le Pend, is a vocal critic of the alliance as well.
So time will tell.
But I didn't, you know, that was sort of the silver lining of, that kind of struck out at me when all this was going down last week.
Right.
Hey, I'll take it.
You know, if it leads to any kind of real dissension between the major powers and the NATO alliance, then I'm for it.
This thing is, as you just were saying a few minutes ago, 30 years out of date.
H.W. Bush should have abolished NATO back then.
Yes.
Think how better off the world would be right now if he had.
Better off our own country would be if they decided to pursue a peace dividend in the aftermath of the Cold War, which they didn't do, thanks in large part to people like Richard Cheney, who went on to achieve even more horrific things 10 years later.
All right, you guys, that's James Carden.
He runs the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord.
You should sign up for their email list.
They send out great stuff every single morning here about what's really going on in our relationship with Russia and all the European powers stuck in the middle and all the rest of it.
And this piece is called How AUKUS May Damage NATO.
Thanks again for coming on the show.
Thanks as always for having me.
I appreciate it, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
