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.
All right, you guys, introducing Clint Ehrlich, most recently known for his Twitter threads on Ukraine and Russia issues, and Kazakhstan for that matter, here in the last few weeks.
But he is a computer scientist, and a lawyer, and a former visiting researcher at MGIMO University.
And you can find him on Twitter, at Clint Ehrlich, and it's E-H-R-L-I-C-H.
And in fact, we'll start with this.
When I first looked you up on Twitter, I spelled it wrong, and the first thing I found was prop or not from years ago, calling you a Russian agent, which has been a real heavy theme going on this week, judging by your retweets and quote tweets there of all these influential people accusing you essentially of being on a list of communists in the State Department or something like that.
You can see the quality of their research, given that they can't even spell my name right.
Yeah, seriously.
Which goes for me too, but then again, I got it right pretty quick, and I spelled it right since then, so that's good.
But now, so let's start with all the attacks.
They're all attacking you, and they're saying that, listen, you explained something from Russia's point of view instead of from only the American point of view on TV, and that's an unforgivable sin.
But also, you were in Russia when you did so, and so clearly you're Putin's puppet acting as his agent, all these things.
So I'll just give you an opportunity to respond to all of that, if you would like, please.
Well, I appreciate that, Scott, and I'd like to note that the attacks actually increased yesterday.
The Washington Post ran an article after my appearance on Tucker Carlson, where they condemned Tucker for having me on, and they included a false accusation that I had been paid by the Russian government while I was in Moscow.
They said that I had worked at a think tank there, and then I complained, and they were forced actually to retract that portion of the story and to admit that that was not true.
The real irony is that while I was living in Russia, I was published in the Washington Post, and they knew that.
They credited me.
And I was a visiting researcher at MGMO University.
And so it's really funny to even see how over the course of just five years or so, they've gone from being willing to publish my stuff to now portraying me as some sort of villain, because while I was in Russia, I had the gall to write about foreign policy and Russia's perspective on America.
And at the time, I thought that I was really providing a service, because I was a visiting researcher at MGMO.
For those who don't know, it's often called the Harvard of Russia.
It's really more like a cross between Georgetown School of Foreign Service and West Point, because it is run by the Russian government, but it doesn't train people for their military.
It trains their diplomats.
And so I was a visiting researcher there.
I had the opportunity to talk to people in their foreign ministry to try to find out what their perspective was.
And I shared that in an article in Foreign Policy, which is now being branded as pro-Putin, just because I sounded the alarm that the Russians were very worried that Hillary Clinton was leading the U.S. towards a war with Russia.
And so it's amazing how if you sound the alarm, if you share the perspective of another nation, that's apparently enough to make you a foreign agent these days.
Yeah, absolutely right.
Which is funny, because that would mean we have a real scandal, since our current head of the CIA was the guy who wrote the State Department document that Manning, Leit and Assange published titled Nyet Means Nyet about their meeting with Sergei Lavrov, his meeting with Sergei Lavrov, where Lavrov told him that in very polite terms, we will do anything to keep Ukraine out of NATO.
And you need to understand that and you need to tell the people back home how serious we are about that.
He's running the CIA right now.
So I guess that makes him a mole and a traitor.
And you and him ought to be strung up together.
I mean, what's really wild is they're making very concrete accusations saying that I'm being paid by the Russians today, that I'm on Vladimir Putin's payroll.
And it's just it's wild because my money right now comes from the U.S. government.
I'm actually paid by the National Science Foundation.
They gave me a grant as a researcher to do my work.
And so these people are really operating in almost a parallel universe and they portray themselves as serious people, but they're buying into what are baseless conspiracy theories.
There's literally no evidence to support this idea that I'm being funded by the Russians.
But as soon as they see a dissenting view, they're willing to throw out those kinds of claims.
Right.
So where are you from and what exactly was your purpose of going there to study?
So I'm from Los Angeles.
I went over there to work on my my language skills and also because originally I was interested in doing doctoral work on the status six torpedo, which was a Russian intercontinental nuclear torpedo was experimental at that time.
And so I was interested in doing work basically in the field of of arms control.
I pivoted while I was there.
I said the Russians were maybe not thrilled about all the questions that I was asking about their torpedo.
And so I realized maybe this wasn't the best thing to study.
And so I ended up working on international securities law while I was there.
And so really, I mean, this idea that I was an intelligence agent just doesn't comport with reality.
Then I came back to the States.
I, I invented a new blockchain technology and decided that that was what I wanted to pursue.
And so I came back to America and have been working on that.
But then when I saw that events were leading us into the direction of conflict with Russia and that people weren't speaking out, I felt an obligation to use my platform on Twitter to sound the alarm.
And I never anticipated the scale of the response that would happen.
I was in Moscow at the time when I posted that first thread about Kazakhstan.
I did go and visit Russia's foreign ministry at MGMO at the time just to to talk to my contacts there to see what their views of the situation were.
And people really were amazed, I guess, to have this outside fresh perspective on the crisis in Kazakhstan.
That thread went completely viral.
Several subsequent threads have gone viral.
And pretty quickly I found myself on on Tucker Carlson's show doing an interview with him.
But it's really been a whirlwind.
Yeah.
Well, you sure don't sound like you're concerned that the FBI counterintelligence division is hot on your tail here or anything like that.
So I think you can stop wasting time with this kind of ridiculous red herring argument accusation.
I mean, I do want to point out it's a it is a real problem for me, though.
I mean, I working in the in the private sector, when people make these kinds of accusations publicly about me, it certainly doesn't help my my company.
It doesn't help me to raise funds.
It doesn't help me to advance my career.
And so that's the real irony that when they say, how much are you paid for making these media appearances?
The answer is this is really directly detrimental to my career.
It would be much better for me to just sit down and shut up and only work on computer science.
I'm really putting myself on the line by doing this because I think that it matters and that people deserve to hear the truth.
All right.
So now let's get to it.
What exactly is your point here that you want the American people above all to understand about American Russia's relationship right now?
The main point that I want people to understand is that there's a non-trivial risk of nuclear war and that we're flirting with it, that we're advancing closer and closer to conflict with a power that has more nuclear weapons than any other country in the world.
And that we're that the reason for that is because of NATO expansion decisions that we made in 2008 in declaring that Ukraine was going to be a member of NATO.
And so now there's this inertia that's propelling us towards conflict because that was a horrible decision and we're not willing to back down over it.
And so you people can complain and say, well, you know, morally, don't you think that Ukraine should have a right to join NATO?
Or don't you think that it's wrong for the Russians to engage in the conduct that they're engaging in?
And my point is that this is really about American lives and about, frankly, the lives of everyone on Earth, because people have just trivialized the concept of nuclear war.
The Russians right now are talking about taking measures that would be truly reminiscent of a second Cuban missile crisis.
They are threatening to potentially deploy strategic forces to Venezuela and Cuba.
And what people don't realize, I'm sure that you realize this, but many of your listeners may not, is that the first Cuban missile crisis was not resolved effortlessly, smoothly in a way that was a credit to American foreign policy.
Instead, we came as close as possible to destroying the entire world.
During the first Cuban missile crisis, when we dropped depth charges on a Russian submarine, there was a vote on board that submarine.
It was a two to one vote in favor of responding with a nuclear torpedo, which would have set off likely a global nuclear war.
And it was a fluke that Vassily Arkhipov was on board that submarine.
He voted against using the nuclear torpedo.
And so that that one vote basically saved the world because they needed unanimous consent.
But this time around, if we have a future conflict with Russia, we might not get so lucky.
There might not be a hero like Vassily Arkhipov who's available to save the day.
And so I'm trying to sound the alarm and say, if you care about the fate of the world, that this kind of pointless aggression is something that you need to oppose.
Now, one thing that you said to Tucker Carlson I thought was important was that NATO doesn't even want Ukraine anyway.
Well, who exactly do you mean by that when you say NATO doesn't want them?
Well, I mean, I think that that broadly within the alliance, I don't know that there's anyone today that that supports the extension of Ukraine into NATO, not even America, not even America, not even America.
I mean, that's I look I didn't have an opportunity to correct Tucker, but in his his lead in, he keeps saying that America is pushing Ukraine into NATO.
And I think that that's really not an accurate summation of the situation.
I think it's better to say that America has dangled the prospect of NATO membership in front of Ukraine with no real of intention, no real intention of actually following through because Ukraine does not come close to meeting the criteria for membership in NATO.
But because we're not willing to admit that we were unserious when we adopted the Budapest memorandum and said that they were going to join NATO, we've we've created this this crisis over a state that we don't even want in the alliance.
And now Merkel's gone now.
And I don't know enough about politics in Germany to know about the stance of the new guys.
I actually read a thing about their new Green Party leaders, a real kind of Hillary Clinton type center left talk.
But I know that in the past, the Germans and the French both made it very clear that whatever the Americans thought, Bush or Obama or anybody else, that they would use their veto power to keep Ukraine out of the alliance.
Well, and I would say that actually in 2008, it was Germany and France that opposed that declaration that Ukraine and Georgia were going to be added into NATO.
They tried to warn the Bush administration, don't do that.
It would be a strategic mistake.
And it was the United States at that juncture.
They really push strong, pushed strongly to include that language.
And so now it seems like we're stuck with it and we should have listened to them at the time.
Yeah.
Hang on just one second.
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You know, I hate all this diplomatic language.
People are so constrained by some prepared words on paper where they say, well, you know, we would never let another country, Russia or anybody else, close the door on NATO membership for someone.
When it's the point, obviously, is just that, well, yeah, but that's just your construct of the whole thing.
You don't have to phrase it that way.
You could be the one closing the door on it or you could just.
And in fact, this is one of the major points, isn't it, that on the December 30th phone call, if I have it right, I think I do.
Biden assured Putin that we're not going to bring Ukraine into NATO any time in the next 10 years anyway.
So he's obviously not going to put that in treaty form.
But that's a pretty big promise and extends past even his second term in office if he wins one.
And so, you know, I talked with Ray McGovern, the former director of the CIA's Soviet division back from, you know, in the 70s and 80s, I guess.
And his thing was that Putin's demand that America promise to not bring Ukraine into NATO now officially or sign a treaty like that, that that was always the big ask.
What he really wanted was a handshake kind of acknowledgement that, as you said, that we're not bringing them in now any more than we were under Trump or under Obama.
We're just, you know, they said that they're not willing to walk it back, but they're also not willing to go forward with it.
But that the real point of contention was the missiles.
And they wanted assurances that we're not going to put the anti-missile missiles, as we put them in Poland, into Ukraine because they have their launch from the MK-41 missile launcher that can also launch Tomahawk cruise missiles.
And so that seemed to be the real point of contention.
And Wendy Sherman had said, I forgot, I'm sorry, the exact quote, but she had indicated that actually, yeah, we made some real progress on missiles.
And, you know, we'll see what happens next time we meet.
And after all, it was just Trump that got us out of the intermediate nuclear forces treaty a couple of years ago.
So I don't know if they'll get right back in the treaty, but they might agree to start abiding by it anyway, so to speak, if you know what I mean.
It seems like, don't you think the crisis is being diffused a bit?
There's, well, I think that the Russians are playing their cards very close to the vest.
And so I would hesitate to speculate and say that I can understand exactly what their endgame is.
I certainly think that it was, there was a misperception in the United States that when the Russians published their draft treaty with the US and their draft agreement with NATO, that that was an ultimatum in the sense that they needed to get everything that was in those documents.
That obviously was not the case.
Lavrov himself said, this is not an ultimatum.
We are open to negotiations.
Now, he did then sort of subsequently issue an ultimatum about Ukraine and NATO, saying that Ukraine cannot ever, ever join NATO and calling that an absolute red line for Russia.
Now, the question is, as you alluded to, well, Ukraine and NATO may be a red line, but what is the extent of the guarantees that would be required in order to reassure the Russians that Ukraine isn't going to come into NATO?
I would highlight one difficulty with the proposal that you've alluded to, the sort of handshake agreement.
And part of it is that Ukraine is currently significantly improving its military capabilities.
They're developing domestically missile systems that could target Russian cities.
And so Russia is, I think, worried about the future and looking ahead towards potential crises.
So maybe in 10 years, when that promise expires, even if the promise were maintained, then Russia would be facing a situation where Ukraine might join NATO.
And at that point, the Russians' ability to intervene and to stop that would be significantly degraded from what it is today.
And so I think that we're right now in a really volatile, dangerous situation because the Russians feel like if they're going to use their military to stop this.
And by the way, I'm not in favor of that war either.
I'm like, when I say that I'm anti-war, that includes being against the Russians intervening.
I'm just dealing with the reality of the situation.
But the reality of the situation is that the Russians may perceive there being a diminishing window of opportunity for them to militarily intervene in Ukraine to carve out a buffer within the state.
And so that's what I think makes this situation right now particularly dangerous.
I would note, you mentioned the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, and I would note that our withdrawal from that really makes the present crisis with Russia even more dangerous, and that the accusations that we hurled at the Russians claiming that they were in violation of the treaty were largely spurious.
The Russians' position was that they were following the direct text of that treaty.
And they were.
The text of the treaty categorizes missiles in accordance with their maximum range.
And so the Russians had missiles that exceeded the minimum range that was required under the treaty in order to not qualify as intermediate range nuclear forces.
Our position was, well, even though they have a sufficient maximum range, they have the capability to be used at a shorter distance and that therefore that's a treaty violation.
And essentially arguing that the spirit was violated rather than the law.
And look, the Russians certainly would have been amenable to further arms control negotiations where the text of the of the agreement was was modified in that respect.
But instead, we just accused them of being in breach when they weren't.
And we threw away a an agreement that really could have stabilized the current situation, at least with regard to those nuclear weapons.
Yeah.
And, you know, when I talked with Charles Freeman about this, he explained and there are other sources, too, that the Russians were deploying these supposedly medium range treaty busting missiles along their frontier with China.
They were deploying them in Europe at all.
And that the real reason the Americans wanted out of the treaty is because they also want them for use against China, not for Russia or Europe, but they also want to put them in Japan and South Korea and whatever they can, you know, Guam or wherever.
And so that was what it was all about, was both sides just want to pick on China.
So they broke a tree that was keeping medium range nukes out of Europe.
Exactly.
No, and that's really a problem with a lot of these these legacy arms agreements is that as China rises and becomes a potential superpower, these bilateral agreements that we have that don't include China then become harder to adhere to because there's this incentive for both sides to pivot their focus towards China.
The problem is that we aren't done with direct confrontation between the US and Russia.
So when we throw away those agreements and we're looking towards the future in regards to China, it ignores the fact that today we would really benefit from having that kind of stability in our ongoing relations with Russia right now.
So I was going to ask you, but I guess you already answered about, well, what's changed since back in 2015, the Donbass region voted to join Russia and asked very politely to and Putin told them yet.
And so and he could have simply just redrawn the border with a magic marker right then.
I think he had enough special operations guys on the ground there to to pretty much enforce his will there.
And he didn't do that.
And so why would he do that now?
America's been sending in a lot of Javelin anti-tank missiles and light arms and trucks and things, as far as I know, training up.
And please comment on this.
Stay behind forces.
There's the reports about the CIA and I guess special forces training them for a possible war.
But you mentioned that Ukraine is working on their own medium range missiles, not that they have nukes, but that they're working on their own medium range missiles.
And that's not just anti-tank missiles, but tactical weapons for use across borders that you think that's the window that's closing, that's forcing the issue to Putin.
I think that that's I think that that's one of the windows, I think, that our ongoing training of the Ukrainian military is also closing the window.
That's not just being done with special forces and the CIA, although obviously for the stay behind forces that you mentioned, those are the tip of the spear.
But there's also really widespread conventional training of the Ukrainian military.
Our National Guard cycles through the combat training center there.
And so they have like a every month, essentially like a new battalion that that goes through and does joint combat exercises with us.
And so there's this ongoing modernization effort of the Ukrainian military.
That's one of the things that is maybe closing that window.
You know, another factor is that Russia, due to our withdrawal from the ABM treaty, essentially developed this new set of super weapons, so to speak, at the strategic level.
And, you know, that includes the hypersonic Zircon missile.
Everyone was was so freaked out a couple of months ago when China did its hypersonic missile test around the world.
But that was only a glider reentry vehicle.
And Russia actually has a maneuverable hypersonic cruise missile.
And so for the first time since arguably certain periods of the Cold War, I would say that Russia has really leapfrogged the United States at the strategic level.
They may actually have a fairly significant advantage in strategic nuclear weapons.
And so that, frankly, may have bolstered Russia's confidence.
It may now view itself as holding a much stronger hand in conflict with the United States or in negotiations.
Not that it would necessarily use nuclear weapons, but that that that threat is there.
And so it may feel emboldened.
Well, I'm back to the nuclear torpedo, because that was announced by Putin at the same time.
I'm sorry, was it 2018 or 19?
He gave the big speech and said, this is what you get, W.
Bush, for pulling out of the ABM treaty.
I believe that was 2018.
And then it was the the nuclear powered cruise missile with essentially unlimited range, he claimed the hypersonic glider, you mentioned a new heavy Merv rocket that he said would go around the South Pole and hit Florida or Texas that way.
And then with enough warheads to kill every city in Texas in one shot there.
And then the nuclear torpedo, which was going to be your expertise.
But I bet you got quite a bit of the way there.
Tell us about that.
I did get quite a bit of the way there, you know, primarily what that is now, you know, it's called Poseidon is a weapon that circumvents America's missile defense system.
So no matter how good our missile defense systems may be in the future, and even though it's our position that we are not trying to target Russia with missile defense, the reality is that we're working on anti Merv, multiple independent reentry vehicle systems, which are pretty obviously targeted at Russia.
So no matter how advanced those systems may be, the reality is that they aren't going to work under the ocean.
And we don't have the sonar coverage to even be able to detect where these torpedoes are in the ocean in order to to target them.
And water is is such a dense medium compared to air that the the range of the signals that you send underwater is so limited that building that kind of sensor away sensor array is really infeasible.
And so the idea is basically just to take advantage of the oceans to be able to to bypass America's defenses.
I think what's interesting is that there was really huge alarm in the United States about the nuclear torpedo, the intercontinental nuclear torpedo being announced, that there was this fear acting like the Russians were crazy in order to deploy a system like this.
And part of what I was working on at MGMOM was an argument that this was actually a fundamentally stabilizing weapon, because if you compare it to a nuclear, an intercontinental nuclear missile, where if you fire it, then you only have a matter of minutes until it hits its target.
And so in the case of accidental launch or in the case of a misidentification of launch, you have the potential to instigate a crisis really rapidly.
A slow moving torpedo gives you the leeway where if this thing gets launched, you could have hours or even depending on where it's launched from, days to cooperate with the other side to try to resolve the crisis, to locate the system and destroy it, or if it's still operational, to have it commanded to turn around.
And so I think that it's actually a much safer weapon in many regards than traditional ICBMs. But it's interesting, it sort of shows how numb we've gotten to the idea of nuclear war and ICBMs, that we hear about ICBMs so much that I think people don't freak out about them.
And the idea of a nuclear torpedo causing tsunamis around our coastlines really struck some sort of deep psychological chord, I would say.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I guess let's change the subject to Kazakhstan.
Sure.
I'm afraid I'm missing something here on Ukraine.
Well, yeah, no, I want to go back to Ukraine real quick.
Just how alarmed are you right now?
Because I guess I was feeling a little bit better about it after reading Ray McGovern there, talking with him, that it was really the missile deal that they wanted to hear, you know.
But I understand what you're saying about that they still have reasons for concern.
I'm pretty alarmed because I think that the United States has been offering the missile deal behind the scenes and that that has not altered Russia's behavior significantly.
And that the fact that Russia is going ahead with these, quote unquote, drills in Belarus, the fact that I'm hearing Russian reservists being called up to to staff up their their their their units.
Is that confirmed?
I don't, I mean, I can't say it's confirmed confirmed, but there's a lot of noise about that, enough that I think that it's true.
And so, look, those may be precautionary measures.
And the Russians, the Russian position is, by the way, that they're worried about the Ukrainian military using force right now in the Donbass region and that these are these are defensive measures in case they need to intervene to stop a significant Ukrainian offensive.
So my point is not so much that it's clear that the Russians are preparing an imminent invasion of Ukraine.
It's just that there's enough that continues to happen to make me concerned.
And look, I'm very sympathetic to the view that that Ray McGovern offered that that would have been my proposal.
Right.
So if I was trying to negotiate to resolve the crisis, the proposal that I would have put on the table and that I would have been, frankly, pretty optimistic about working would have been let's have a commitment to not station missiles in Ukraine, because that's what Vladimir Putin has said he was most concerned about.
That was what he highlighted in his speech.
Right.
So I would hope that that would be the main concern of the Russians and that it would resolve the situation.
My concern is it doesn't today at least seem to have worked.
So so I remain pretty concerned.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, you had a pretty compelling thread about what was going on in Kazakhstan there and whether or not it was or included aspects of color coded revolution type interference.
But go ahead.
Well, I think that that thread was was largely misunderstood because my point was not so much that it was clear that what happened in Kazakhstan was a color revolution.
My point was more that when we have entities like the National Endowment for Democracy that make all these anti-government grants inside unstable states, it's really dangerous for us because if there is a revolution, then the Russians connect the dots and they blame us and that it really is kind of irrelevant whether or not the revolution is is objectively caused by that kind of support, whether that support is a partial cause.
You know, people can can slice that up however they want.
The reality is that it's it's dangerous and destabilizing for us to provide the funding regardless, because when inevitably there is political turmoil in those states, it looks like there's the smoking gun that's left behind.
So I oppose that kind of funding regardless of whether it's really effective in destabilizing governments.
All right.
So, yeah, let's get back to the American possible role there in a second.
But give us the background about Kazakhstan, because it's such an important country and yet it's such a long way from here, as Luke Skywalker might say.
Right.
So Kazakhstan is a is a huge country.
It's about the size of Western Europe.
It has the largest continuous land border in the world with Russia.
You know, our border with with Canada is technically longer, but it's divided between Alaska and the continental United States.
So that border is huge.
The north of Kazakhstan contains a tremendous number of of ethnic Russians and Kazakhstan is itself a huge strategic interest to Russia because it's where they have their primary cosmodrome to launch their rockets and also where they do their their missile defense testing.
And so Kazakhstan is a area of great strategic interest to Russia and one that had remained relatively stable under the leadership of Nazarbayev, the president.
He was he had recently been replaced by his handpicked successor, Tukhaev.
But there was a power sharing agreement where Nazarbayev remained in control of the Security Council in Kazakhstan.
And so even though he wasn't the president, he was in charge of the military and the security forces.
Did they even hold an election or did he just hand the power over to this guy?
There was nominally an election, but I don't think that anyone really believes that elections in Kazakhstan are legitimate.
You know, they're sort of like elections in in in North Korea.
So they you know, there's something like, you know, I for 99 percent or something in that sphere of approval for Tukhaev as president.
So, you know, don't I may have that that number slightly off, but that it's in the ballpark.
And so but what was really striking is that Tukhaev had announced that there was going to be a reduction in the fuel subsidy that was keeping the price of liquefied petroleum gas down, which is used not just as cooking fuel there, but as gas for automobiles.
And once that happened, that that scheduled reduction in the subsidy, there was a huge uprising primarily primarily in Almaty, the former capital and the largest city in the country.
But what's interesting is that even once he announced that that the fuel subsidy would be reintroduced, that was not enough to placate the protesters.
And I use protesters loosely because they killed a lot of people and they used a lot of heavy weapons.
And so that that's where you get into this question of were they really protesters or was this something more nefarious?
And it sure looked like a color revolution or an incidence of an instance of hybrid war because they were making these very direct political demands about cutting all relations with Russia at the same time that they were attacking key government facilities, taking police and military as prisoners.
And so that that would be why there was so much concern about U.S. involvement or at least Western involvement.
It might have been Turkey.
It might have been other outside actors.
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Right.
Yeah, it does seem like this is the common theme.
It was reminiscent.
I mean, it's a correlation, not necessarily proven causation or anything, but in Syria had a lot of, you know, spontaneous protests as part of the Arab Spring days of rage all across the region.
But then at the same time, he had guys with rifles who immediately came out, started assassinating cops.
You know what I mean?
It was on from these certain prepared factions to turn a protest movement into something else.
But then, you know, if you say that, then people go, oh, well, but look, it's protesters, they're poor, they live in a dictatorship, their price of fuel was raised, and now they can't put food on their family.
And so, of course, they're protesting and you're siding with the bad guys against them when, you know, protesters are kind of irrelevant.
When you have an armed insurrection going on, they're kind of, you know, beside the point in a way, not that their complaints don't matter, their rights don't matter anything, but it's just there's a more important story going on when you have these groups of people.
And what do they do?
Right.
They sack the banks and the airport and all these things.
They seem to really be prepared.
Right.
Can you elaborate a bit about that?
Absolutely.
And I would highlight something that was a little bit different about this potential color revolution than what we saw in Ukraine.
This was almost like a an accelerated color revolution in the sense that in Ukraine and in many of the prior color revolutions, you had these mass protests for a very, very long time.
And it seemed like the goal of the protesters was to goad the security forces into using force, into shooting some protesters, at which point they could then retaliate and sort of make it look like they had a, you know, a moral justification for using force against the government.
And what happened in Kazakhstan was not that at all.
The security forces were were not shooting protesters.
Instead, in the course of about three days, you went from mass protests that were suppressed, not particularly aggressively, to then having huge numbers of armed fighters, potentially jihadists, although that, you know, that that's still a little bit unclear, who were then attacking key strategic facilities.
They knew where arms depots were and they went and raided them and got access to RPGs and rifles.
And so it seemed like it was very well planned.
It was hard to believe that somehow protesters had just gotten incensed by the reaction of the government and had spontaneously figured out exactly where to attack and how to get arms.
And now the New York Times, you know, kind of wore their emotions on their sleeve and their news section there.
This is, you know, oh, man, it's already not working.
The Russians are coming to shore up the government.
And that was pretty much the end of this revolution, huh?
It was an incredibly effective deployment by Russia.
We'd never, and it wasn't just Russia, you know, it was this Russian led security organization, the CSTO, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, sort of like Russia's equivalent of NATO.
They had never actually engaged in a peacekeeping operation before.
And so it was really striking when immediately within hours of the request being made, they were airlifting troops into into Kazakhstan and they had a really brilliant strategy.
They didn't want their forces to be directly engaged with protesters, potentially shooting them.
And so what they did was they had the foreign troops provide security for critical infrastructure in order to free up the Kazakh troops to then be the ones who were on the front lines with protesters or terrorists.
And that worked really well.
And essentially the revolution ended almost immediately.
I think a big part of that also was that before many of the Kazakh security forces were defecting, you know, you see this in any unstable revolution where people are trying to figure out, look, who is the victor going to be?
And they try to align themselves with the victor in order to get the best treatment possible at the end of the conflict.
And once Russia made it clear that it wasn't going to allow the government of Kazakhstan to fall, that signal alone, even without deploying more forces, was enough to show the Kazakh troops, look, this government is not going to fail.
And so it would be really a mistake for us to defect.
And so the defections ended right away.
And that was really the end of the revolution.
All right.
On the Tucker show, you brought up George Kennan and his warnings.
What's the significance there?
Well, the significance is that today many of the neocons portray themselves as cold warriors, but the strategy of containment that actually won the Cold War against the Soviet Union was crafted by George Kennan, known sometimes as Mr.
X for his famous Mr.
X article in Foreign Affairs, where he laid out the containment strategy.
And what's interesting about Kennan, well, among many things, is that he was one of the most vociferous opponents of NATO expansion before the first round of NATO expansion happened in 98.
He said that it was going to be one of the worst strategic mistakes in the history of the West.
And then after it happened, he warned that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict with Russia, that it would lead us towards war with Russia.
And when it did, the NATO expanders would say, see, we told you the Russians were like this all along.
That's why we had to expand NATO.
And he said that that just wasn't the case, that the Russians would not have been so hostile if we hadn't expanded our military block to their doorstep and that we shouldn't have done it.
Right.
And now I wanted to point this out.
I'm not sure who all knows this or don't, but there's this great article, which to me, surprisingly, is by Jerry Brown, you know, Governor Moonbeam, they call them.
I don't know that much about him, but the old governor, I've met him a few times.
OK, so he did a review in the New York Review of Books and it was a review of William Perry's book, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink.
And so in here he talks, of course, about Kennan, but he also says, and I was just too young for this at the time, you know, I know all my buddies at Cato were good, Doug Bondo and Ted Carpenter and all that.
But it turns out that the Butcher of Asia, Robert McNamara, hey, confessed Butcher of Asia, it ain't just me.
Robert McNamara agreed that we should not be doing this.
And Paul Nitze, who had been Kennan's rival, you know, Kennan wanted containment, Nitze wanted rollback.
And he was the guy that wrote NSC 68 and all of that.
He also said we should not be doing this.
And there's a whole list of hawks.
And I'm sorry, I'm looking at it now.
There's a paywall.
I tried to pull it up here.
But people can look that up, put it in archive.is and they'll show you the whole thing there.
And you can see where people who were, never mind Pat Buchanan and the paleoconservatives, who also were very harsh anti-communists when the communists controlled Russia, but even people like Nitze and McNamara were agreeing with Kennan and saying this is a huge mistake to do.
I think that what's.
Oh, and I'm sorry.
And Perry himself apparently was fired.
Is this right?
Perry himself, I believe, was fired from the Clinton administration over his opposition to it.
He was the secretary of defense.
And Clinton went with his secretary of state and with his old buddy, Strobe Talbot.
Yeah, I mean, I think that what's what's really interesting is that if you if you look at the course of NATO expansion and not just from the NATO expansion that's happened, but also the the declaration of the intent to further expand NATO in 2008, that the rationales that were given at the time don't line up at all with the rationales that we see today.
So in 2008, when there was this proposal that was adopted saying that we are going to expand NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia, nobody was saying that the reason we were going to do that is because Russia, Russia was a revanchist power that that was going to take over these territories.
Instead, the message to Vladimir Putin and the Russians was, look, this is this has nothing to do with you.
This was this isn't hostile at all.
This is just the natural development of an alliance that isn't even pointed at Russia.
And it was the critics of it who said, look, the Russians are going to see this as directed at them.
And for that reason, it's going to be destabilizing.
Now, that prediction was completely true, like it was just absolutely vindicated.
We now find ourselves on the brink of this horrible conflict with Russia and the advocates of NATO expansion have thrown away that prior justification saying, oh, it's not threatening towards Russia and instead are saying, well, actually, Russia was aggressive all along and that's why we needed to have expanded NATO.
And so you really see them moving the goalposts to defend their own policies.
Yep, absolutely right.
And of course, as you said in that famous piece, now word from X by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, as predicted perfectly in the year 1998, as soon as Russia reacts, the same people say now that they won't react because this isn't about them will say, well, that's why we had to do it, because of all of their aggression.
Exactly, exactly.
They said Russia wouldn't react, then Russia did.
And now they say that's why we had to expand NATO.
Yeah, that's crazy.
Hey, I found the paragraph here.
Bob McNamara, Sam Nunn, Bill Bradley, Paul Nitze, Richard Pipes and John Holdren and Richard Pipes, even Richard Pipes and Robert Gates was one of them to the guy who had been the head of the CIA and which that was surprising to me that even Robert Gates had opposed it then.
Of course, the guy that later became Secretary of Defense for W.
Bush and then Barack Obama.
Well, I mean, these guys must have all been Russian agents then, right?
Obviously, anyone who exposes NATO expansion today must be a Russian agent.
So, you know, by the same logic, all of these men should be questioned in regards to their loyalty.
Yeah.
And that's to me, it's just jaw dropping.
Right.
Richard Pipes.
And hey, if Bob McNamara is telling you that what you're doing is too aggressive, you should heed his counsel.
That's my idea.
You know, alarms should be going off at minimum.
I strongly agree.
And it just shows you that the these today that the people that we have advocating these positions are sort of fundamentally unserious because these were, you know, you may disagree with them significantly, but they were serious thinkers about U.S. foreign policy.
And I think that part of what's so scary is that we've reached a point where the people who are in charge, the people who are charting the course of our foreign policy really seem to be ideologues of a sort that we didn't even have, that they they're not willing to to look at at the reality of international relations and the dangers of what they're proposing.
And so I really wish that we had this this prior era of statesmen still around to to rein in the excesses of our foreign policy.
All right.
I'm sorry for keeping you so long, but I got one more question here.
It goes to somebody that you quote tweeted here when they were criticizing you.
I forgot which one it was, but it's the common understanding and theme, even when unstated, which is that if we had already brought Ukraine into NATO, then they wouldn't dare try it.
Right.
This is not aggression, really.
It's just we're extending our security umbrella to as many people as possible so that no one will ever mess with them because then they'd be messing with us and no one will ever mess with us no matter what.
And so.
All that we do really here is just keeping the peace, and that clearly is the way they see it.
It's it's a remarkable thing, and there's there's so many things wrong with that argument, as you just alluded to, that the end point of that argument is the idea that we should probably just expand NATO to the entire world because then there would be no war if we if we just had a military block that extended to the borders of the Earth, then there would be no conflict.
A more direct response would be that one of the reasons that it was so stupid to say that we were going to add Ukraine to NATO was that it was clear that that was a red line for Russia.
And so they were never going to allow it to happen.
And so, yeah, maybe in a perfect world, if there were some way to add Ukraine to NATO without destabilizing Ukraine, you could argue that would be a good thing to do.
But we live in a world where Ukraine's neighbor is Russia, where Russia's vital strategic national interests are threatened in their in their view by us adding Ukraine to NATO.
And so it was clear that they were going to take whatever measures they had to in order to stop that from happening.
And the ongoing instability in Ukraine is intimately connected with that because obviously you can't add a state into NATO that is an ongoing condition of war because then basically you're just declaring war at the time that you add them.
And so we basically drew this giant target on Ukraine saying to Russia, hey, come destabilize this state because we want to add them to NATO.
And if you want to stop that, then you need to instigate a conflict inside the country on your border.
And so it's just these people are operating in this hypothetical world where if Ukraine could just instantly become a NATO member state without any opportunity for Russia to intervene, that would be a good thing.
But it bears no resemblance to reality.
Can I just say quickly that as bad as what David French was saying is, and it's pretty bad, that what's crazier is that there was this op-ed last week that I mentioned on Tucker's show from this woman, Evelyn Farkas.
She was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration and she was a senior advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.
And in this op-ed in Defense One, she argued that we need to give the Russians an ultimatum that they have to leave Crimea and that if they don't, that we should put together a coalition of the willing and then force them out.
And Scott, I don't know that I can find words to convey to your viewers how crazy this proposal is.
You might as well tell the Russians, get out of Moscow.
We're going to invade.
That is how closely connected to Crimea the Russians are.
From their perspective, it is their sovereign territory.
And even though they on paper have a no first use policy, I sincerely believe that if they were losing a conventional war over Crimea, I think they would use nuclear weapons to defend it.
And so I think that this woman is proposing basically starting World War Three.
And the idea that people like this are involved in senior positions of government should be terrifying to everyone.
Hmm.
Well, she does go pretty far in here, although, you know, I heard you say that on The Tucker Show and I couldn't find that part of it.
There's a couple of mentions of Crimea in here.
She it's so if you if you look at the bottom, it's that she doesn't say Crimea.
What she says is that we have to give them an ultimatum about occupied territory.
Right.
But it's clear that when she says occupied territory, that that includes Crimea.
She considers Crimea to be occupied territory.
So the ultimatum that she wants to give Russia includes Crimea.
No, I see what you're saying there.
You're right.
I guess the implication earlier in the article seems more like she's just talking about the Donbass and that because everybody knows Crimea is a fait accompli.
Right.
But maybe that was just me.
I think you're right.
No, I don't.
I don't.
I don't seem to be going that far here.
You're right.
Yeah, I read that as her saying that we need that that that that is that Crimea is occupied territory and that we have to roll back Russia from that territory.
Oh, yeah.
And she's also saying they got to get out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, too.
Right.
Exactly.
Everywhere.
And that's just even though, you know, they're in South Ossetia on a an agreement that was signed with the European Union in the first place.
So it's hard to call that an invasion and aggression, really.
Right.
One would think so.
All right.
Well, anyway, I really appreciate your time on the show.
It's been really great.
And I'll be following these great threads on Twitter.
It's been my pleasure.
Thank you so much.
I really enjoyed it, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is Clint Ehrlich.
It's E H R L I C H.
And you can find him on Twitter at Clint Ehrlich.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
