04/28/14 – David Rohde – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show, and our next guest is David Rhode.
He's an investigative reporter for Reuters and contributing editor for The Atlantic magazine.
Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Uncovered the Srebrenica massacre.
How do you like that?
Former correspondent for The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor and the author of Beyond War, Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, David?
Great.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I appreciate you joining us on the show.
I want to recommend to the audience your work here at The Atlantic.
Quite a few interesting articles.
Well, I guess three or four of which I've read about Russia here, and the latest of which is called How America Lost Vladimir Putin.
And just kind of taking us back 14 years, as you say, from the turn of the century.
I guess he came to power New Year's Eve 1999, right?
Or the dawn of the year 2000 there.
And you seem to be arguing, not that, you know, it's all America's fault or some kind of argument like that, but just that it really did not have to be this way.
And I think maybe the inverse of that, too, that we could fix it because our interests and their interests don't necessarily have to be in such conflict.
Is that about right?
Yeah, I mean, I think basically the easiest way to sum it up is that we sort of made our problems with Putin worse.
He was never going to be, you know, an easy partner.
One of his central goals was sort of reasserting Russian strength, and it's pretty ugly what's happening now in eastern Ukraine.
But this definitely wasn't the sort of best 14 years of U.S. policy towards Moscow.
We were at times sort of inattentive, at other times overconfident, and then sometimes just outright clumsy.
Well, you know, everybody makes a big deal about the fact that he's a former KGB agent, which is, of course, you know, very relevant.
But at the same time, I mean, the implication sort of there is that he's still some kind of communist or some kind of totalitarian anyway.
You know, maybe more of a right-wing one than a left-wing one or something like that, but I mean, I don't know.
Henry Kissinger has been counseling for years that, you know, hey, this is a guy who, you know, yeah, he's come back to power as president, but he did step aside for a few years there and become prime minister.
And this is not exactly Joseph Stalin with his you know, iron grip on power.
Maybe it's a bronze grip or something.
I don't know, but I think you understand what I mean.
What do you think of that?
Well, I think that he is, it's not Joseph Stalin that he's killing people, but there's no question that he's sort of systematically jailed anyone who changes, you know, challenges power.
You know, if you, you know, from Khodorkovsky to you know, Pussy Riot, anyone that he sees as a threat is sort of marginalized.
He uses more subtle techniques than Stalin, but I would, let me, so A, I agree with you on the broad point, but I don't, I don't think he's, I mean, I think there's sort of fundamental issues, as you talked about in the intro, that the U.S. disagrees with him on, and one is, I guess, our view of democracy, and he's very, I guess, skeptical of that.
And then the other issue is how Russia, you know, the issue of Russia's neighbors, should they be allowed to join NATO or the European Union?
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, and I want to get to all of that, actually, but I'd, you know, I sort of want to get out of the way here about, you know, who he really is, because so much of what we hear is just you know, his insatiable appetite for power and that kind of thing.
And yet, you know, as you say here, it's not just he wants to be the leader of conservatism in that part of the world or something like that, but he is a conservative himself.
He's not a radical.
He may be a strong man in a sense, but he's not out to turn the world upside down.
He's, I mean, I think his main thing is that he's a Russian nationalist.
He doesn't want to recreate the Soviet Union, but he he was, you know, he was served as a KGB officer, as you mentioned, sort of in the twilight years of the Soviet Union in the 90s.
He was posted in East Germany, and I'm sorry, in the 80s.
And then in the 90s, he was a Russian government official.
He was under Boris Yeltsin when he rose to power.
And what's really marked him was a sense of Russia being weak under Yeltsin, and in the 90s in particular, a sense that the West took advantage of Russia's weakness.
There's a lot of debate about whether he has a, you know, an exaggerated view of what the U.S. did, and we can get into that more if you want, but more than anything else, I think it's fair to say he's a Russian nationalist.
Well, I guess my understanding there was he kicked out the gangsters that were friends with the Americans and put his own gangsters in power, basically.
Is that about right?
Well, I, yeah, I mean, I'm not an expert on that period in U.S. history, but we did talk to a bunch of U.S. diplomats, current and retired, who worked then, and they agreed that the U.S. sort of could have done more to aid the, you know, some of the reforms that went on trying to privatize the Russian economy and that kind of stuff, but there's sort of plenty of blame to go with Putin himself and other Russian leaders that didn't do the best job in terms of privatizing everything.
There's a tendency, you know, from Putin to argue that the U.S. is sort of responsible for everything from the protests in the Ukraine to oligarchs, you know, getting all the private resources in Russia, and I think that's kind of overly simplistic We've made huge mistakes.
And like I said, we've been arrogant and times like that, but there's some Russian blame for the corruption that went on in the 90s.
Well, at least legend has it.
I don't know the footnote, but I'm being Mr. Middle of the Road reporter here.
Oh, yeah.
No, that's all right.
No, that's quite all right.
And of course, like you said, it is going back to the 90s and that's not in your article anyway, so I'm, you know, I'm taking us a far field from our topic here a little bit.
But anyway, but it is true that there's huge that there's a sense that Putin represents a very broad feeling among Russians that they were sort of weak in the 90s and they were taken advantage of by the West and that they are not going to let that happen again.
You know, is that a is that a fair view?
You know, I don't know.
It doesn't matter, right?
Yes, they it's very widely believed in Russia, very widely believed and that itself is the news in a sense, right?
Yes.
Now.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you mentioned this here and legend has it that Vladimir Putin was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush on 9-11 or later that evening or the next morning or something.
I don't know and say, hey, I'm at your disposal here.
What can I do to help?
And I don't know if you can verify that and I don't know how much that really matters.
But the point is he did reach out to the Americans and say please let us help you the whole northern supply route into Afghanistan and all that.
But I was wondering if you know the story about the fight that he had against the politicians to his right inside Russia about how in the world can you invite the Americans into our soft underbelly like that?
But he had made the calculation that no, we're going to take this opportunity to be their best friend in their most extreme hour of need and then they're going to pay us back in respect and it's going to work out.
And it really cost him a lot of political capital at the time the way I understood it.
It did.
And then it's interesting.
There's another person who's been doing a lot of commentary on this.
Khrushchev's daughter has been writing, great stuff, Nina Khrushcheva.
And she's a professor here at the New School in New York.
I saw her and she said that the Putin of sort of 2000-2001 was more open to working with the West.
He did see the 9-11 attacks as an opportunity and what he was looking for was sort of a reciprocal view from the U.S. of the war in Chechnya.
That once he pushed it back on the nationalists, as you mentioned, that did criticize him for helping the U.S. post, you know, 9-11.
There was a expectation on Putin's part that the U.S. would sort of declare certain Chechen groups terrorists and the U.S. didn't do that.
And that's the sort of beginning of this moment in sort of 2001 sort of being lost.
And then it was, was it in 01 or very early 02, right away almost, that they announced they were withdrawing from the anti-ballistic missile treaty so that they could put anti-missile missiles in Poland, right?
Yes, so it's the George W. Bush administration and it's December of 2001 when it's, and Putin, you know, given a warning beforehand.
Yes, it was still December 2001 and he really sees that as kind of a, that's an initial sort of slap in the face.
And then after, and he basically doesn't believe, and this is a kind of clear theme here, is that Putin just flat out doesn't believe American explanations for what the U.S. is doing.
He, you know, we at that point, Bush and the neoconservatives are saying they want to build a missile shield for Europe and it's to prevent you know, missiles being fired from Iran that might hit U.S. bases in Europe or hit U.S. allies in Europe.
The Russians say, no way, this is an effort to sort of block our intercontinental ballistic missiles from potentially striking at the U.S.
Again, you can argue about what in truth the missile shield was for, but he doesn't believe it.
The same thing happens when Bush and other Western countries sort of push for NATO expansion in Eastern Europe.
You know, the Western leaders say that this isn't an effort to surround Russia, but Putin clearly sees it that way.
And that all helped, that sort of is a process that continues through 2002, 2003, through 2005.
And now Robert Gates in his new book says that Dick Cheney had the idea, at least back during the Cold War days, I don't know about during the Bush Jr.
Administration, but back in 91, that he wanted to not just dismantle the Soviet Union, but all of Russia itself.
And I wonder whether is that kind of widespread knowledge, at least inside the, you know, the people who control power in the national security state in Russia, were they aware that those were the kind of knives that were out for them?
Because it would seem like they would be very paranoid.
And of course, Russia's been invaded 5,000 times, right?
Yeah, no, and that's what one of the key sources in the story was a guy named Thomas Graham, who was the Senior Director for Russia Policy on the National Security Council.
He felt that there was a real moment in 2001 to, he wanted to see a new security architecture in Europe, where NATO would no longer exist, and there would be some sort of new organization created that would include, it would have three pillars.
One would be the U.S., one would be United Europe, and one would be Russia.
All of that, you know, was lost.
The sort of hardliners in the administration, Cheney and others, won that argument, and they expanded NATO and built the ABM Treaty.
That specific comment, you know, Tom Graham didn't mention to us, but you know, whatever the intention, he clearly thought the kind of hardline policy backfired towards Russia.
Well, I mean, it really does kind of put the rest of all of this in context, where, you know, their argument is, I think you even paraphrase someone in here saying, you know, no president should turn away, I guess it's the Cheneyites saying, no president should turn away an Eastern European country that's only asking for our help and friendship and protection, and that kind of thing, when what they're really doing is, if not dismantling Russia, they sure as hell are, they're doing rollback, right?
This is containment plus.
This is rolling back and keep rolling back till they're gone someday, even if the Democrats aren't as severe about it as the Republicans.
Jeb's still coming, you know what I mean?
Yes.
And that's the way the Russians have got to be looking at it, right?
Well, we, you know, there's nationalism in all countries, and Bill Clinton, you know, faced the same thing, and that he was a key figure, you know, obviously in the 90s, and you know, we were told by both Democrats and Republicans that it's very difficult for an American president to say, I'm sorry, you know, even though the majority of people of Poland and Hungary and Romania and, you know, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, you all, you know, want to join NATO, but sorry, you know, you're going to have to live under Russia's control, and that we too had our own sort of Cold War hangover and a deep suspicion of Russian motives, and they argued that for a Democrat or Republican president, it's very difficult for them to be seen as betraying these, you know, if the majority of people want it in an Eastern European country, that they should have the right to join NATO.
Well, and then again, perception is everything, right?
So they have to know that, assuming that they have the most benevolent motives in expanding NATO, because the more NATO members, the more peace in the world, or whatever, they still have to know how it looks to Russia.
And this is Tom Graham's point about, you know, who's a long-time conservative, and he, but apparently not as conservative as Cheney, but he was arguing that it would have been effective, a more effective thing to have created some new security organization, and not had it be NATO.
Well, there was a little bit of that in Clinton years, right?
The NATO-Russia Council, and I think there was some talk, there was even a Tom Clancy book, right, where they bring Russia into NATO.
Comes the great white army of the north, I guess.
Yes.
But it didn't happen.
But it's a series of things that leads to, and a key thing also is also the invasion of Iraq, and we heard this from a lot of former Bush administration officials that Putin, as well as, you know, the leaders of France and Germany, saw it as sort of an illegal act that sort of flouted international law, and more than anything, and it was seen as a U.S. regime change.
And again, from the Russian perspective, is that at about roughly the same time as the U.S. invades Iraq, there's also two color revolutions that didn't get much coverage in the U.S. press, but there's something called the Rose Revolution in Georgia, when a pro-western leader takes power there, and then soon after that is the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and that's seen as this period when there are these, again, in 2003, there's the U.S. invades Iraq, the pro-western leader in Georgia, and then in early 2004, pro-western leader in Ukraine, Putin sees all this as American regime change, and he starts fearing that he's going to be next.
Yeah, well, Kyrgyzstan, too, right?
And that was in 2004 or 2005?
You are, I can't tell you for sure, but you're right.
It was, sometimes it was pink, sometimes it was yellow, sometimes it was tulips, but it was one of these color-coded revolutions, and it lasted about a year or two before it fell apart, I think.
That was in, Kyrgyzstan was 2005.
But we, you know, and so from a U.S. perspective, it's the spreading of revolution from Putin, among Putin's inner circle.
It's sort of a series of, you know, CIA plots that are designed to, you know, designed to do this.
I mean, we did ask the question a lot to Michael McFaul.
He's a Russia expert who was Obama's sort of point person on Russia, and then he was the U.S. ambassador in Moscow until earlier this year, and he said it's true that the U.S., they did fund civil society groups and sort of pro-democracy groups in the former Soviet bloc.
Putin talked about, you know, huge amounts of money, hundreds of millions of dollars being sent to these groups.
McFaul claimed that it was hundreds of thousands in total since 1989, and that these, there were these groups, but there was also sort of a genuine desire in these countries for more accountable governments and again, a shift towards Europe, which Putin dismisses and says, no, these were all American plots.
It's very similar to the situation today in Ukraine.
Well, I'm from here, and it's hard for me to believe that when the NED and USAID and all these government, you know, CIA-lite organizations basically are funding all these groups and putting all these people out into the street that it's only because we love democracy so much, we love seeing other people have it and seeing only people within the borders of these countries that were helping overthrow their governments benefit and decide their future course.
I mean, come on, what are they, they love the people of Kyrgyzstan so much?
Come on, they never even heard of Kyrgyzstan until they overthrew it, you know?
Well, I spent time in the Baltic republics in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia right in 1991 when they got independence from the Soviet Union, and they were thrilled.
I mean, the vast majority of people there wanted to be independent.
They didn't want to be part of the Soviet Union.
I wasn't in, you know, Georgia, Ukraine or Kyrgyzstan, so I don't know about it, but I, you know, I think you, again, it's hard for me to say, but there is that desire in some countries to be independent of Russia.
Oh, yeah, well, no doubt about that, but there's also Bruce Jackson and the Committee to Expand NATO, which is all just about airplane sales and that kind of thing, too, so it's always a big mess, but and, you know, here's the thing about this great article.
Again, it's David Road at The Atlantic, and it's co-authored, I should say, co-written with Arshad Mohammed here at The Atlantic, and you just, the hits keep coming and coming.
I'm sorry, every time we try to elaborate on any of these points, David, we end up obscuring.
There's so many more.
There's Kosovo independence.
There's Bush doubling down on the missile defenses going into Poland, which thankfully Obama had backed down on that at least, but then there was the Ossetia crisis in August of 2008, of course, when Georgia invaded South Ossetia, and then Russia came and took it back and set it independent again, and then, and maybe this is the one that, well, you can elaborate on any of those that you choose to, I guess, but maybe we should get back to these NGOs and USAID and all of that.
Like you say, Russia's paranoid that they're next.
I mean, I would think that the fact that, hey, we're still talking about the Russians here, and they still have thousands of H-bombs here, and we just cannot mess around.
Come on.
We just can't try to overthrow the government in Russia.
Maybe we'd like to see a more friendly government in Russia, but the fact that we can't means tough luck, right?
But he actually went ahead and outlawed these organizations.
Nobody knows.
I don't know how much money they were spending, but they are there in Russia and supporting the opposition and, you know, Hillary Clinton posing with the pussy riot all the time and all these kinds of things.
They do have reason to worry about one of these sort of color-coded type revolutions, or at least the Americans trying one in Russia, don't they?
Do you think?
Well, I would say it's a basic right of pussy riotists, you know, to get a photo taken with Hillary Clinton.
And it's very worrying.
Well, the question is Hillary's motive in posing with them and being behind that kind of thing, supporting, you know, any of those other groups.
Well, it's freedom of speech.
I mean, it's, you know, it's a very basic thing that, you know, in a way he's sort of overreacting, but I think it's unusual what he did where basically all these, any groups that, you know, that he was sort of outlawing any groups that receive any kind of foreign support, declaring them traitors, you know, limiting demonstrations, you know, basically bringing, you know, what are fraudulent tax cases against groups he saw as his opponents.
I mean, I, these are sort of basic norms, European norms, that people felt he was, Well, I mean, that's the thing, as we talked about here, America did support a bunch of color-coded revolutions across the region, right?
And so it's not that he's just paranoid and hallucinating here.
And they do use USAID and these NGOs to support the groups that stay out in the street and refuse to respect the election results until the things go their way again, right?
That's the way it goes.
I don't know.
I wasn't at those revolutions.
And if you want to see them as CIA plots, you're welcome to, but you know, I just don't think that's accurate based on the reporting from other journalists who are actually on the ground.
So, so, but, So, the Kyrgyzstan and Georgia and Ukraine, when you were listing those color-coded revolutions, that wasn't to imply any sort of American intervention or bankrolling of the groups doing those regime changes?
You're just saying that was what the Russians thought, but not that that was correct?
That's, yes, because I'm not, you know, I haven't, I wasn't on the ground then, so I don't know.
We could talk more in detail about the current protests in Ukraine and interviews I did about that.
Sure, well, and listen, to be perfectly clear here, I'm clear, but to be clear to the audience, you're a reporter here, and, you know, I'm not trying to get you to report things that you don't know or confirm stuff that's not a fact in your own mind or whatever, but I wasn't present for those three revolutions, so it's hard for me to say what happened.
I understand that.
But again, what we're talking about is, and right down to the current crisis, everything comes down to interpretations from all around.
Because I think it's fair, and this isn't based on my reporting, but, you know, colleagues, you know, from Reuters and The Atlantic and other news organizations that are on the ground, that there's no question that at least people in Kiev and in western Ukraine clearly want to join the European Union.
There, all the people that were out protesting in Kiev aren't, you know, being paid off by the CIA.
There is this desire in western Ukraine to be closer to Europe, whereas in eastern Ukraine, there's, you know, many more ethnic Russians, you know, and there's some, you know, that they have a different view in eastern Ukraine versus western Ukraine, that Ukraine's very divided on this.
Well, and it's unfortunate for Ukraine, for the people of Ukraine, east, west, and the rest, just the same as in Syria and a lot of these countries where you have these great powers who are fighting over them, and what they want only kind of matters in a way, you know what I mean?
They're in an unfortunate position.
I mean, hey, it's better to be stuck between America and Russia than Germany and Russia, I guess, if you have to be Ukrainian, but they've had it worse, but in a sense, yeah, I mean, here America's supporting some guys as, you know, the Nuland phone call leaked and all that, they're supporting their favorites, and the Russians are supporting their favorites on the other side, and both sides accuse the people in the streets on both sides of being illegitimate because of the foreign states intervention there, and they're both partially right when they make those claims, and so the whole thing's a giant mess.
I don't see any white or black hats on any side, really.
It is, and that's the thing, but it's, and I guess the thing I wanted to point out was that, you know, the Obama administration's, you know, adopted also a very kind of where we're defending democracy in Ukraine and a very, almost, it's not the same as the George W. Bush administration's position, but it's very similar in terms of Russia can't bully its neighbors, and so there is this Cold War hangover both in Moscow of suspicion of the U.S. and then in Washington of suspicion of what Russia is doing.
Right, well, and of course, they're backing a democracy which, after all, had made a deal for the president to stay in power till December and then hold new elections, and then the Nazi stormtrooper seized all the buildings when he called the police back and ran him right out of town, and then they sort of kind of impeached him without the numbers or without the actual legal process for impeaching him, so some democracy to defend.
I think they just mean pro-western and pro-American when they say democracy now.
Well, I would agree.
I mean, we did have one American diplomat, say it would have been better if that agreement you're talking about, the February agreement had, you know, had stayed in place and there had been negotiations, but I think calling all the protesters Nazi stormtroopers isn't really accurate.
No, the ones who seized the buildings, it was in the New York Times, man, on February the 21st in the New York Times, it was the Nazis who seized the buildings and drove the government out of the city.
I'd never said every protester was one of them.
I don't think anyone ever said every protester was one of them.
Right?
Yes, I just, I'm trying to be, trying to parse the language you're about.
I know, well, I mean, comes down to it, it was the right sector and the Svoboda that did the coup.
It wasn't the grandmothers out in the protest, you know, saying they want good government or whatever.
Those weren't the ones who accomplished the regime change.
They were there, but they were, you know, witnesses at best, bystanders, maybe.
And the same, again, it's the same kind of thing going on in the east right now with the characterizations of who's who and who's accomplishing what.
We have mysterious green men, but we also have regular townsfolk who are saying they don't respect the new government.
And the best thing would be, according to all the observers we talked to, the best thing would be a good election without Russian or American manipulation to see what, you know, most Ukrainians want.
That'd be a great first step.
All right.
Hey, listen, I'm sorry.
I've already kept you way over time, but thank you so much for your time, David.
I really learned a lot and it's a great piece here that you've written.
Thank you so much.
All right, everybody.
That is David Rode.
He's won the Pulitzer Prize twice, a former correspondent for the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor, and now he's at Reuters and The Atlantic, and this one is called How America Lost Vladimir Putin.
It's really good.
I do hope that you'll check it out, and we'll be right back.
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