11/15/16 – Andrew Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing our friend Andrew Coburn.
He wrote the book Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, which is no overstatement.
And he also wrote the book Kill Chain and a bunch before that about Iraq and about weapons back during the Soviet days and all kinds of things.
And he is something or other, senior something at Harper's Magazine.
Washington, what is it, bureau chief?
Washington editor.
Washington editor, there you go, at Harper's Magazine.
The New Red Scare is the cover story for the December issue.
The New Red Scare, Reviving the Art of Threat Inflation.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Andrew?
Hey, Scott.
Good to be with you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Wonderful article.
It'll be the spotlight tomorrow on antiwar.com.
I'm running it today at the Institute site.
And, yeah, it's really great here.
There's all kinds of things to it, but I guess if it's okay, let's do like you do here and talk about a little bit of history and just how dangerous these nuclear weapons are because I think you and I may have spoken about this aspect before, that ever since the fall of the USSR and the end of the official Cold War, nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons issues and the clear danger of them hanging over all of our heads, it's really just kind of fallen to the back burner.
Nobody really thinks about them or talks about them very much, even including politicians, but especially just among the regular public.
It just seems to not be an issue.
So maybe you remind us why you think this is such an issue in the first place here.
Sure, because, as you said, they haven't been an issue since the end of the Cold War because people kind of imagined, reasonably enough, that it had all gone away, that we'd had these thousands of missiles pointing at each other, nuclear missiles for years and years, and now that the confrontation was over, surely they would have been packed up and put away.
But in fact, that didn't happen.
They were kept in their silos, a lot of them.
In some, there was a reduction, but it was still enough to blow up the world a few times over.
And they were kept on ready alert.
They were kept on basically ready to fire if the moment anyone thought it was a good idea to do so, if they thought the other side was attacking.
In fact, that nearly happened, I think, in 1994, when the Norwegians fired a weather rocket into the upper atmosphere and the Russians thought this was an incoming strike, and they were thinking about launching.
That happened many times during the Cold War.
We've remained, much more than people realize, in this state of terrible sort of hair-trigger alert and terrible sort of risk, I mean, all the way from that day till this.
And then you go on.
Now, these maniacs are talking about, well, they are modernizing the entire force.
They're going to build a new ICBM and a new bomber and a new submarine launch missile with a new submarine to go with it and more satellites, and it's all about money, but it's going to make the situation even more dangerous if that were possible.
Now, talk about that, because in the article you say that it was the negotiations, we actually covered this at the time, is the negotiations over the new START treaty is what led to this entire new trillion-plus-dollar project to revamp the nukes?
Exactly.
That's why these arms control talks are really pretty dangerous, because they always lead to some initiative like this.
What happened was that Obama wanted a foreign policy triumph, like they all do, and arms control treaties are meant to be a good thing, and he talked very piously during his campaign about abolishing nuclear weapons, and he made a famous speech in Prague in March 2009 about how his goal was to abolish nuclear weapons.
So, okay, he gets his treaty, which is to reduce the arsenals on both sides, but not that much, by a bit, and to not build certain kinds of weapons.
But then he had a problem, because he had a Republican Senate, and so he had to get it ratified.
It was a treaty, after all, and the only way he could get it ratified, get the Senate Republican representatives of the arms lobby to sign on to this, was to promise them what has turned out to be a trillion-dollar nuclear modernization plan.
So, in order to get this treaty he could boast about, we have newer, allegedly better, and unfortunately more usable nuclear weapons, which is very disastrous.
Well, let's go ahead and get right to the worst part of the article, then, as long as we're there.
The more usable nukes.
They also, as you talk about, they've been sailing battleships, these Aegis cruisers, or however you're supposed to say it, right?
I forgot.
Aegis cruisers that they've sailed in the Black Sea and in the Baltic Sea that have provoked the Russians into flying their jet fighters and buzzing our ships very closely.
Donald Trump, at one point, the new president-elect, even proposed shooting those Russian planes down for buzzing so close.
But there's a lot more to that story that is not in the usual newspaper pieces about it.
Can you explain about that?
Sure.
You know, so, I mean, we have to go back a little bit more into history.
The end of the Cold War, it was sort of agreed, the Americans proposed to the Russians, said, OK, you know, you let us unite Germany and put Germany and NATO, and then we promise that you pull all your troops out of Eastern Europe, and we promise we won't expand NATO into Eastern Europe.
They broke that promise.
They did expand NATO into Eastern Europe, right up to the Russian border.
So now when, you know, relations took a turn for the worse in recent few years, you know, all these little countries that were now under the NATO umbrella and were, you know, demanding that we show willy, you know, we show support and everything.
So we've been sending these, not very many, Aegis actually, destroyers.
And an Aegis destroyer is a Aegis system is an air defense system.
It's meant to shoot down airplanes and even maybe missiles with these Aegis missiles.
OK, so they're sailing around in the Baltic and in the Black Sea as well, actually, I suppose, to reassure the Ukrainians.
But the problem is that these missiles or missile launchers look, although they're designed and intended allegedly just to shoot down planes or missiles, they actually look exactly like cruise missiles.
I mean, the launchers, cruise missile launchers or cruise missiles themselves.
So the Russians looking at them saying, well, we don't know if these are just defensive weapons or something that could launch, you know, reach Moscow in a few minutes.
I think you say in the article, it actually is the same launcher.
It could be used.
It's a so-called dual use launcher.
It could be a nuclear capable cruise missile.
But that's all.
So they're identical to all intents and effects.
So so this is extremely scary for the Russians.
So they've been taking very aggressive measures.
They've been buzzing them, as you said, and they've deployed more submarines in the Baltic and in the Black Sea to counter them, you know, to sink them if it looks looks threatening.
So now the Americans are sending more anti-submarine systems aircraft to counter that.
And now actually just it was after my article went to press, the Russians have now deployed their sort of tactical nuclear or short range nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad, which is this area between just on sort of in the Baltic.
It's sort of cut off.
It's it's a Russian base on the Baltic.
They deployed the Iskander missile, which is a nuclear missile.
So you've got this slow escalation sort of going on with no one paying much attention.
You know, it's it's extremely scary.
And, you know, if something went wrong, someone accidentally hit a ship or whatever, you know, the balloon could go up.
Well, and so that's the thing here.
You quote this guy, Bruce Blair, who used to be a nuclear forces officer, I guess.
And he's saying that what's going on here where you just describe with these Aegis cruisers being nuclear capable and looking like maybe they're pointing nukes at the Russians the way they are, that this is actually being done in a situation where the Americans are basically unaware of what it is that they're doing or how it is that this looks to the Russians.
And he says nobody's paying attention on the National Security Council.
No one at defense.
So they just do this.
But I'm looking.
I'm trying to scan here for the word here.
But, like, basically, we're just blind here.
This is just the government machine rolling along and no one is really taking into account the context that you just explained here.
Exactly.
And, you know, Bruce Blair, he was he was for many years.
He was a launch control officer in a Minuteman silo.
He sat there with one other guy and they were ready when the orders came to turn the keys and launch 48.
I think it was 48 from memory.
I see nuclear, you know, intercontinental missiles towards Russia.
So he you know, he spent a lot of sitting next to that.
And there was there was one nuclear missile right sitting right next door to where he was.
So he's thought a lot about this and he's thought a lot about how he runs an organization called Global Zero.
And he's thought a lot about how easily all this stuff can be launched.
And that's why he's so freaked out at the moment at the way we have these ships and planes playing games in the Baltic.
But, you know, with with, as you said, you know, unimaginable consequences that were imaginable, actually consequences.
I mean, something could go wrong and suddenly we're in a nuclear war and no one, you know, none of these bozos in the Obama administration.
I wouldn't certainly wouldn't expect anything better from the Trump administration.
Sort of seemed much of a no little and care less about what's going on.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, that's the whole thing.
Here's the quote.
This he says, we're in a low grade nuclear escalation.
That's not even necessarily apparent to ourselves and ourselves, meaning the eyes of the U.S. government that's doing the escalation.
They don't really have the imagination, I guess, to see the other side's point of view and and the context within which they're really operating.
They're just doing what they're doing and everybody else better look out.
And it's as easy as that.
It's truly frightening, you know.
So, yeah, no, it's very scary situation indeed.
All right now.
So Trump's one and the headline yesterday is the best headline I've seen since.
It's really even better than the phony reset with Hillary Clinton and Medvedev because, one, it was just Medvedev and not Putin.
But, two, it was Hillary Clinton and you can't count on her, man.
Unreliable.
And, of course, she completely botched that reset.
It was never held to account for it, but lost anyway, thank goodness.
But anyway, so now Trump has said, nah, screw that.
Let's get along with the Russians.
Wouldn't that be nice?
And I'm sure not for, you know, allying with him in Syria or anything like that, just for stopping picking a fight.
But doesn't it look like even despite the whole national security state that this is one thing that Trump really believes in and means to implement that we are backing off Russia, whatever exactly that entails?
He may well, yeah, I'm prepared to accept that.
But the problem is that he is, you know, it's like someone sort of, you know, trying to sort of, you know, someone in a canoe trying to tow a super tank around.
You know, it's he's got the enormous weight of the national security state, which is violently opposed to anything like this.
And I'll give you an example.
I mean, today in the Senate, John McCain, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, saying that he said he is he's announced publicly, he said any attempt to reset relations with Russia is unacceptable.
He said with McCain went on with the U.S. presidential transition underway.
Vladimir Putin has said in recent days that he wants to improve relations of the United States.
We would place as much faith in such statements as any other made by a former KGB agent who has plunged his country into tyranny, murdered his political opponents, invaded his neighbors, threatened America's allies and attempted to undermine America's elections.
So there you have it.
You know, that's and so all the people, pretty much all the people that Trump or we the rumors say he might put in the job of running the Defense Department or the State Department are all sort of, you know, tend to be mad dog cold warriors.
I mean, John Bolton, that creepy little fellow, you know, who, you know, he's a sort of demented on the demented end of the neocons.
Rudy Giuliani, this this weird, weird sort of, you know, wannabe cop.
And as ignorant as Donald Trump himself, really.
Giuliani is ignorant and even sort of just as nasty, if not nastier.
You know, Mike, I don't know.
General Flynn sounds kind of crazy.
But yeah, he co-authored a book with Michael Ledeen.
Well, there you go.
There you go.
You know, so, you know, in the face of all that, I mean, Trump himself, you know, what he certainly says about Russia is, you know, eminently reasonable and sane and, you know, cheering to the all good thinking people like you and me.
But when he's up against the McCain's and the Bolton's and the Giuliani's and the and the other fellow.
Oh, God, I can't remember his name, the former head of the CIA.
Another nutcase he's talking about putting on.
Oh, right.
Felix Rodriguez.
No, no, no, no.
Just be back at the waterboard.
Oh, no.
Wrong.
Rodriguez.
Felix Rodriguez is George H.W. Bush's guy.
I'm thinking of the torch.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rodriguez, the torturer.
Sorry.
Yeah, we're getting old.
I know.
I'm feeling it.
I mean, you know, your question is the important one.
Can Trump do it?
You know, he's mighty.
He might do.
I mean, he might do.
He's got to do it fast before they sort of sap away at him.
And, you know, and put, you know, present to, you know, make, you know, provoke incidents, you know, so that turns him against it.
But he might do it.
But my betting is against these, you know, apart from anything else, you know, the military industrial complex is has got a huge shopping list.
You know, there's the nuclear modernization we talked about.
That's a trillion dollars, you know, bigger army, bigger Navy.
And Trump has promised that.
He said, you know, he's going to increase the army to five hundred and forty thousand men.
You know, twelve hundred fighter plane Air Force, 350 ship Navy.
So, you know, but to deliver on that, you need a threat.
You can't you can't just sort of say we're going to have it to sort of march around in parades.
And, you know, really confronting a bunch of sort of terrorist thugs in Syria and northern Iraq doesn't quite do it.
And you need to do better than that.
You need you need something bigger, you know, a nation state, a big nation state.
So it's either Russia or China or both.
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All right.
Now, so you talked about it was funny the way you talk in there about even adjusting for inflation, how with all the spending during earlier days in the Cold War, at least you got some ships for your money.
I mean, sure, they were do nothing floating fortresses basically made to destroy wealth.
No question there.
But at least you had some to look at or something to test nukes on.
But nowadays the money just goes nowhere at all.
Tell us a little bit about some of these bigger projects where they literally had nothing to show for it at all.
And I mean, besides handing Iraq over to Osama and the Ayatollah.
That's right.
Well, my favorite is the the army had a system they were working on for years called future combat systems.
And this was a sort of techno fantasy of, you know, there was going to be all these.
The whole whole army division or more would be all linked together.
They'd all be networks of computers and incredibly super duper accurate shells and missiles.
So that at one point they said the tanks wouldn't be or the vehicles wouldn't even need armor because they have, you know, stuff would be so accurate that we would wipe out the enemy before they could fire at us.
Anyway, it never worked.
It never showed any sign of working.
And finally, in about I can't remember, 20, 20, 2009 or 2010, after they'd already spent 50 billion dollars and that was just on paper, you know, just drawing things on, you know, computers and on paper, they hadn't actually built anything.
It got canceled because the projected price by that point had grown, I think, to something like 250 billion dollars.
But before that, they actually, when they were still trying to get money out of the Congress for it, General Casey, who was then I think the chief of staff of the army, actually took a mock up, had them park a mock up on the mall in front of the Capitol, in front of Capitol Hill, and go and announce that this was it.
This was a completed, you know, this was an example of future combat systems.
It was just a fraud and a lie.
But that's one.
I mean, the army's got a whole host of them, you know, that they, you know, are spending all this money.
I've forgotten, they've got a thing called the European Renaissance, I can't remember what it's called now, but some program which they're spending three or four billion dollars a year on at the moment to, you know, to bolster forces in Europe.
And that's amazingly, it turns out to be one brigade, an armored brigade, which will go to Europe occasionally.
Overall, out of this army at the moment, I think it's 480,000 men.
And we basically can deploy, you know, if war breaks out tomorrow, we've got about 12,000 men ready to fight.
I mean, you know, two maybe three brigades that are actually ready to fight.
Let me guess, two thirds of the entire army are generals and their staff, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We have more.
I think I say in the article, I think it's like 12 four-star generals.
The whole thing is just a big welfare program, basically.
Exactly.
Just by comparison, I should say we fought most of World War II with just four four-star generals.
They promoted a few more at the end of the war when it was over.
But basically, we got along with millions and millions of men, you know, with just four top generals.
And you say in here, too, that and, you know, maybe this gets written off as like, you know, the $100 hammer and the $600 toilet seat and this kind of thing.
But you talk about really billions and billions of dollars being spent designing and maybe doing prototypes of endless numbers of different kinds of guns, artillery pieces, tanks and armored vehicles of every kind.
Anybody can ever dream that we can't really even we don't even really know how much money they're really spending on guns that will never fire.
I mean, projects that go on for years to develop some kind of replacement for the Bradley or something, but then they never even make one.
Right.
Well, that's you know, that's that's the juiciest part of the operation.
And once you start building something, you know, first of all, people might notice that it doesn't work.
And secondly, you know, you have to buy the metal and then, you know, pay the workers.
You know, it's much more profitable to be just doing R&D and studies because then you can really you can really rake in the dollars.
You know, that's a that's a that's an important part of it all.
See, I think regular people, they just can't imagine a system working like that because no business can run like that where they do all R&D and no actual sales to any customers.
That's going to bankrupt the old man pretty quick.
You know, I'm not saying they don't want the thing to go into production.
I mean, they do.
But it's you know, it's it's quite OK just to be doing R&D because you also make money on production, obviously.
But I mean, when you said that how much money they're spending, that's literally true because, you know, the Pentagon famously hasn't passed an audit or hadn't had an audit in 30, 40 years.
They have no idea where all the money goes.
You know, we give them close to 600 billion dollars a year and they cannot tell us what they spent it on.
I mean, you know, you can say, well, yeah, they did.
There's an aircraft carrier.
They must have spent a few billion on that.
But, you know, there's no actual account.
There's no way of getting into the books or they weren't certainly not doing it to say exactly where the money is.
You know, OK, you go.
We gave you a million dollars here to spend on that.
Did you spend a million dollars?
We don't know.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, this gets back to Trump and his position here.
I mean, it's not like he's Ron Paul, the peacenik.
I mean, he's he's basically he's kind of a Rumsfeldian in a way.
Right.
I mean, you write in the book about how for Rumsfeld he's not really anything.
He was just deciding politically what to be.
But he decided to be a right wing nationalist.
And that's sort of what Trump is.
And so he could be just as dangerous as isolationist in that sense.
But it sounds like with this big of a military, like Madeleine Albright said, you got to use it for something.
Or by the end of eight years, people are going to start talking about cuts, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, people have talked about cuts the last eight years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Even during that it's been happening, but it hasn't really.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, they had some sequester.
Did that ever amount to much at all or what?
No, no, no, no.
I mean, it was they say, you know, the military bleat about, you know, how there have been these terrible cuts.
But they haven't really just what's been cut, you know, in 2012, just before this, just before the sequester came in.
You know, the administration was saying we're going to spend, I can't remember now, you know, X, X on on defense.
And then, you know, they they didn't spend they haven't spent quite that much.
So the only cut is is down from future future expectations as opposed to, you know, spending less money than you did last year.
Speaking of Ron Paul, that was a perfect quote of him.
That's how it always is with everything.
All cuts are only a reduced rate of growth ever.
Right.
That's right.
Yeah.
Now.
So listen, you talk about Ukraine in here and this is the one that I think is the most important.
And I know audience.
I'm sorry.
Forgive me.
I'm a broken record on this, but it's the most important kind of thing.
I talk with Mark Perry, who is a colleague of yours, Pentagon reporter.
And I asked him, hey, man, the generals, when they talk about Ukraine and they talk about Russia, at least in the back, you know, room when they're smoking cigars and drinking whiskey and stuff.
They admit to each other that they're liars and that they know that America did two coups in 10 years and that they're the ones who picked that fight and that no one was killed in the taking of Crimea.
And that, you know, all the leaks and claims about Russian invasion of Ukraine never really happened beyond whatever tens, maybe hundreds of special forces.
Certainly not thousands and thousands of infantry coming like that.
They know they're lying.
They're just making money.
Right.
This is about money.
We're going to sell some big ticket items and we're going to have some good cushy golden parachutes when we leave the force and all that.
Right.
And Mark Perry says to me, no, they believe their own BS.
Almost all of them like there's McGregor and them who don't really believe in the policy, who therefore don't believe in the threat.
But everyone who believes in the policy, McMaster and all the people want to expand into Eastern Europe.
Man, you can't tell them that Vladimir Putin is not the new Hitler, the new whatever that must be contained.
They believe it.
They have to.
Right.
Well, that's sort of.
Yeah, they have to.
It's like someone said to me who worked in the Pentagon.
They said he'd never understood how we know in the communist countries and the Communist Party, you know, the party line would shift overnight.
You know, we look from, you know, we like Hitler.
We don't like, you know, we peace with Hitler, war with Hitler or whatever.
And everyone would immediately switch.
Well, it's like that in the Pentagon.
You know, the party line changes and they all you know, they all go along with it.
You can't get to.
It's very hard, I think, to put people of weak character to to get to the top.
And I think only people of weak character do get to the top and, you know, maintain a sort of sceptical independence of mind or independent and sceptical mind about things.
So I think Mark's right that they they do believe it, you know, that they all you know, you can you can brand them with red hot irons and they'll still say, you know, if they're if they're on the F-35 program, they'll say, oh, it's a tremendous, you know, it's a tremendous success.
Or, you know, if they're McMaster, they'll say, you know, H.R. McMaster's sort of rising general.
He'll say, yeah, the Russians are a terrible threat.
I mean, I think they really learned to sort of internalize it.
See, torture just doesn't work, even if you branded them with red hot irons.
Bastards.
I don't know.
Turn them over to the meanest guys over at the CIA and we'll see.
But yeah, no, I hear you.
It's and yeah, it's a real shame, too, because, you know, the guys, Friedman, George Friedman from Stratforce said that the coup in Ukraine was the most obvious coup in world history.
OK, good.
I think we can just go ahead and settle on that as consensus then, since we all saw it happening in real time anyway.
You know, there's a great clip of Ron Paul on on Fox News where they say, Ron Paul, how come you keep saying that there's a coup going on in Ukraine and that, you know, what is all this about a coup?
He's like, yeah, no, really, they're trying to do a coup right now.
Watch.
And then it was the next day that they overthrew the government there and the president had to flee all the Nazi thugs in the street.
You know, so anyway.
Yeah, I mean, it'd be nice if we had.
And, you know, I mean, I wonder about this.
Like, I mean, Putin, he's no dummy, right?
He's a lot of things, but nobody ever says that he's stupid, really.
And so kind of he knows that nobody really wants to have a nuclear war.
They just want to sell a bunch of submarines and stuff.
Right.
But then the problem is that maybe it really is worse than that.
And I think maybe he knows because you have people like Carl Gershman keeps writing in The Washington Post that we would like very much to overthrow the government in Moscow, which sounds sort of like the ultimate challenge.
You know what I mean?
Well, that's he's got a new ultimate challenge because he was, as you say, he say he was he was the one who most explicitly said what what was planned for Ukraine, as I recall, in the fall of 2013.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And said, and you might be next.
And he just wrote another one of those for The Post a couple of weeks ago.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
So I guess I mean, that's part of the game, we think.
Right.
They don't really want to fuse hydrogen atoms over our heads or anything like that.
But they're trying to get old Putin to react enough that they can point to his reaction.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He cut defense spending last year and they were all caught grumbling like Fred Flintstone.
You know, it's supposed to be boosting.
Absolutely.
But that doesn't get mentioned too much.
You know that he cut defense spending.
Anyway, it's only less than a tenth of hours.
Yeah.
So, well, it's an interesting thing now.
Well, here's something else, though.
So Angela Merkel and Francois Holland, they went over there and I think they stopped in D.C. and told Obama what they were doing.
I don't know if they asked him first or not.
But then they went and they cut this Minsk two deal to end the Ukraine war, which is, you know, more or less held.
There's been violence, of course, but the overall war is over.
So that really raises the question of what our so-called ally, really our satellite states in Europe think about all of this saber rattling, too.
I mean, if there's a war here, the Germans are caught in the middle, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, Obama, I mean, yeah, things have really sort of settled down in Ukraine.
I mean, they're still sporadic, a little bit of violence along the dividing line.
But basically, you know, basically it's been settled.
The Minsk agreement is pretty much held.
But I think the Obama administration, they've kept up the rhetoric because they don't want to make it sound.
I don't want people to get the perfectly correct idea that Putin has succeeded.
You know, that Ukraine hasn't turned into a big NATO base, like that was the plan.
I mean, he's going to keep Crimea until the end of time.
So, you know, Putin hasn't done too bad.
He's handled the crisis fairly well from his point of view.
He probably didn't, you know.
But the Obama administration keeps up that sort of mini Cold War just because they do out of petulance.
I think they don't want him to seem to have a success.
Yeah.
Now, help me out with the date here.
Sorry to put you on the spot.
But it was right after the Ukraine war broke out, wasn't it, that you had your report that had all the military industrialists having their fancy party and celebrating?
Whatever it was, March 1st or 2nd, 2014.
Yeah, just at the very beginning of the war, just as Putin is taking Crimea and all that.
They're saying hip, hip, hooray.
It's a brand new day for arms salesmen in D.C.
Yeah, this was described to me by someone who was there.
It was a defense lobbyist breakfast in D.C. on K Street, in fact, home of the lobbyists.
And all the defense lobbyists were there.
And I asked my friend who was there, I said, what was the mood like?
He said, I'd call it borderline euphoric.
Right.
Wow.
So that's really the American system.
You could call it, you know, ultimately, it seems like if you were setting it up as some kind of machine, it would seem like the purpose of it would ultimately be murder, suicide.
And then all the corruption and palm greasing is the lubrication that makes all the gears go, even though ultimately it could get us all killed.
You have just the right vested interests in just the right places to keep it going.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for coming on the show, Andrew.
I appreciate it.
Certainly.
Any time.
Very good to talk to you again.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
That is Andrew Coburn.
The article is The New Red Scare at Harper's Magazine, and they'll let you pass the paywall for this one special this month.
It's harpers.org for The New Red Scare.
I'm Scott Horton.
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai