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All right, you guys, introducing our friend James Carden from the Committee for East-West Accord.
And he writes for The Nation magazine.
And his article is also republished here at the Stop the War Coalition page.
I don't know if you know.
A new poll shows the public is overwhelmingly opposed to endless U.S. military interventions.
You don't say.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, James?
I'm all right.
Thanks for having me.
Well, as you know, I think this project that you participate in here, the Committee for East-West Accord, is just obviously on the face of it.
You can tell just by the title, the most important project in the entire world.
America and Russia's relationship is the single most important issue concerning all of humanity.
And then everything else is in a millionth place compared to that.
That's it.
It's the only thing that really matters.
And that's the center of your effort.
Accord.
I'm for that.
Accord.
We can do that.
We don't have to get more lovey-dovey than that, but definitely we need accord.
So listen, you're my hero.
Seriously, I mean that.
That's very kind of you to say.
I wish that were reflected in our page views, but we're trying to get out there, but it's not easy to breach the mainstream.
Yeah, well, sorry about that.
I guess it's all your fault that Trump's president somehow or something, right?
How much did Putin pay you?
How much did Putin pay you?
Anyway, let's talk about this great war article, anti-war article, anti-war poll results that you wrote about here in The Nation magazine.
What's going on?
Well, this was a poll that was commissioned by a group that's called the Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy.
And I think they incidentally probably have had as much luck reaching the mainstream as the Committee for East-West Accord.
But they commissioned this poll in November, and the results were really quite cheering.
I mean in a, you know, in a time when there's really a lack of happy news.
What the poll sort of confirmed was what I think people like you and I have long suspected, is that there isn't really a popular – America's endless military interventions abroad aren't exactly popular.
And so I can just go through some of the figures, some of the headline figures if you'd like.
Yeah, sure.
The posters asked should the U.S. deploy the U.S. military only as a last resort?
And 86.4 percent of those polled said yes.
Another finding was that a majority of those polled, 57 percent, feel that military aid to foreign countries is counterproductive.
Again, this is something that folks at antiwar.com have, of course, long suspected.
Now, that number goes up when the pollsters talk about whether or not the United States should be sending military aid to Saudi Arabia.
Here's what they write.
It is important to underline that this sentiment increases significantly when framed through the lens of countries like Saudi Arabia.
Indeed, they found that nearly 64 percent of those polled said that we should not be providing money and weapons to countries like Saudi Arabia.
And so the poll would seem to support a movement and the growing movement in both the House and the Senate to prevent the U.S. from continuing to support Saudi Arabia's really grotesque war and blockade on Yemen.
And I think that that issue, you'll be reading a lot more about that in the coming weeks.
There is a movement afoot in Congress to really do something about that.
And I think that the poll would lend support to it.
Yeah, well, I think it's all important, you know, especially it's the rank of priorities.
It's great to hear that people are this opposed.
I mean, how could they support it after all this time?
A guy interviewed me last night.
He was so on board for Iraq War II.
Oh, man, was he on board for Iraq War II.
But now he's man enough to look at the results and go, oh, my God, was I wrong?
I ain't never been wrong or about a worse thing ever.
So forget that.
You know what I mean?
That's not some hippie crybaby.
That's a guy who learned the hard way of being on the wrong side of a thing for a while there.
You know, I don't know how anybody could be on board anymore.
But how do we make it the centerpiece?
It's just, you know, I understand why the anti-war liberals and progressives.
I think the leftists mostly stayed anti-war all along.
But the progressives and, you know, the closer you get to the center, the more wishy-washy, the more loyal to Obama.
So they kept their mouths shut for eight years while he slaughtered innocents.
But at some point they have to figure out how to slink back and pretend that they never left and just go ahead and be anti-war again, right?
Except all they ever do is attack anybody for opposing the CIA's agenda, attack anybody for opposing ratcheting up tensions with the Russians.
And just they're so on board with this, you know, centrist imperial point of view.
It's like they don't know how to climb down and become anti-war anymore.
And all their obsessions with Trump are that he's not warlike enough.
I don't think that they particularly want to.
I agree with you that they should want to slink back and say that they're very sorry and they've changed their ways.
But there's very little evidence that they had.
One article written a few months ago really struck me as sort of representative of that mindset.
It was written in The Atlantic by a former Defense Department official, a young guy named Andrew Exum.
And he's nominally a liberal.
And he wrote an article saying, well, you know, the we should be giving support to the arms industry because after all, they create jobs.
So it's that sort of mindset.
Well, he should talk right.
He's a guy who gets paid to promote war.
Well, sure.
And you don't get a billet at The Atlantic if you are espousing sentiments such as those that that we espouse.
Right.
You have to be completely on board with the neoliberal, neoconservative project.
Just look who finances the Center for a New American Security, which just hired Victoria Nuland to be the CEO, by the way.
Did you see that?
I did indeed.
Yeah, indeed.
It's a classic example of failing up in Washington, D.C.
Victoria Nuland is largely responsible for the disaster that unfolded in Ukraine.
And the Obama administration basically tacitly aided and abetted Kiev's rather savage war on the Russian speaking eastern part of that country.
And, you know, with the result of over 10,000 dead, over a million people displaced.
But, you know, she's going to be fine.
She's now the president of CNAS and her predecessor, another neoliberal defense, so-called defense intellectual, Michelle Flournoy, is left to start her own consulting firm.
So, you know, the opportunities for people such as Nuland and Flournoy and Exum are endless, just as long as you are on board with the project of endless global American hegemony.
Yeah.
Now, so I mean, this is kind of the thing of it, right?
It's the big paradox of the American empire is the American people don't want to be an empire.
They like the whole we're number one, like we're the best football team in the league kind of thing or something like that.
But they don't really want to be the rulers of the world, the world's policemen, as right wingers say, when they're against it.
And, you know, just warmongering imperialists, as the left more accurately describes it, I think, which, you know, to right wingers, policemen is a good thing.
But anyway, the fact of the matter is, though, like we're from North America and we're other than blacks or the descendants of slaves, we're the descendants of people who fled the old world so they could come here and be free and not have to deal with the permanent crises of Eurasia and all of this.
Right.
And so our government is basically dragging us kicking and screaming into this thing.
They get to scare the hell out of us every once in a while.
But you'd be hard pressed to find just a regular old American who's not a government employee, who really thinks that all this is good for us.
It's clearly not.
They say war is good for the economy.
Well, how come the economy always sucks then?
And we've been at war this whole time, you know, and regular people can figure that out.
You don't have to be an Austrian school economist to say, when is the next bust come?
And we know it soon.
Was it Randolph Warren?
War is the health of the state.
Yeah.
And the death of the rest of us.
Right.
And I think, you know, again, circling back to this poll, the the the results were very much bipartisan.
So, you know, voter support for restraining military action overseas.
Just look at these numbers.
Seventy eight point five percent of Democrats were for restraint.
Sixty four point five percent of Republicans for restraint.
Sixty eight point eight percent of independents for restraint.
Now, how how what explains and it'll take a brighter light than myself to figure this out.
But what explains this big divide?
You have the public overwhelmingly opposed to these military adventures.
And yet the consensus bipartisan consensus in the Beltway is that we need to be everywhere at once.
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All right.
So.
Donald Trump, there was a poll that said where they went with some liberal professors, went and studied the districts in, I guess, Wisconsin and Michigan and places where he had won, where Hillary was supposed to win or the Democrats always win.
And they, you know, and it's easy to see how he had that sort of appeal to Reagan Democrats that like, no, I care a lot for union working men types and whatever.
That was a banning thing even to get those people to turn out and all of that.
But this study showed that, you know, it's actually the counties where more guys died in the Iraq and Afghan wars.
That really turned out for Trump because he was calling Hillary Clinton a trigger happy Hillary and implying that even though he was going to, you know, take the conflict to the Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorist types, that he was going to back off all these regime changes and back off all this foreign policy of aggression.
He never really promised anything like this, but he was implying by saying things like, oh, these guys should have just gone to the beach for the last 15 years.
We'd have been a lot better off, which is, of course, true, said, you know, we'd have been better off.
We never were over there at all.
And so and Hillary, of course, said we needed no fly zone over Damascus immediately for Al Qaeda and possibly in conflict with the Russians.
And people just thought that was irresponsible.
It's not like Bernie Sanders even pointed it out.
But regular people could just tell that, you know, we're sick and tired of Hillary Clinton posturing as the worst warmonger in D.C.
We don't like that.
And those districts actually turned out for Trump and helped really make the margin there.
Can't blame that one on Vladimir Putin, can you?
So it seems like that message would finally be getting through to people in the House, the Senate and in the presidency.
The American people are really sick and tired of this.
Right.
And Trump also continually said during the campaign, and this really pissed off the establishment, he said, you know, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get along with the Russians?
Right.
That is a sentiment that I believe would be and is popular among the country at large, even in spite of this hysteria, this ginned up hysteria by over, you know, Russian hacking and collusion and whatnot.
You know, and this is something that liberals in particular, I won't name names because I'll get in trouble, but Hillary lost.
And they've been, you know, in the first couple of weeks after the loss, it was like, OK, what are we going to blame this on?
Well, the country is misogynist.
The country is, you know, racist.
Racist.
Yeah.
All working class white people are racist.
The same racist who turned out for Obama twice, who didn't turn out for Hillary Clinton, the white lady.
They didn't turn out for her because they're racist.
That made perfect sense.
Remember, they try that one for a minute.
Right.
But the real cause, I think, is is what that study points to, is that these are the people from which by and large are fighting men and women come from.
And they've had 15 years of consecutive war, continuous deployments, deaths, injuries, families ruined.
They come back from these wars.
There are no jobs for them.
And it's this sort of empty.
They're greeted with this sort of empty, you know, you're you're our heroes.
But, you know, the government isn't really going to do very much for you.
The V.A. system is a disaster.
So, you know, that makes a lot of sense that it was Hillary Clinton's record.
Her her her enthusiasm to send these young men and women over to fight these pointless wars.
Well, she's just so tone deaf that she always thought you could tell was her.
She just knew like this was the closest article of faith that if you're a Democrat, especially if you're a woman, you have got to be muscular and tough to impress Robert Kagan.
And she could just never get the idea that impressing Robert Kagan does not translate to getting Republican American voters to turn out for Hillary freaking Clinton of all Democrats.
That's never going to work.
She should have been appealing to her Bernie base that were sick of war.
And she all she had to say was, you know, some of these things really were excessive and maybe we need to do a little bit of strategic rethink.
It could have all been noncommittal, just nothing.
But if she had just even admitted the slightest bit of responsibility and making a mistake there and the need to rethink maybe how insistent we are in intervening all over the place, something like that.
She didn't even have to mean it, but she'd even just said that it would have been the margin.
You know what I mean?
But instead she was like, oh, yeah, no, I'm going to actually do a fundraiser with Robert Kagan and I'm going to I'm going to brag about my muscular record.
And then I'm going to go on and run on it.
And then, of course, the other thing that that liberals studiously ignores the fact that she ran a very bad campaign.
She had very she hired very vapid people like Robby Mook to to steer the campaign.
She spent she spent time in campaigning in the reddest of red states.
They actually thought that they were that they were so far ahead that she could afford to to to campaign in Arizona and Texas.
I mean, you know, what planet are you on?
And, you know, it's come out since.
And she was saying, no, that makes sense to me because I supported the Iraq war and Texans love the Iraq war.
Right.
And it turns out that Bill Clinton knew that this was a losing strategy, said so and was ignored.
So the long and short of it is that the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party has only itself to blame for for losing in November.
And and unfortunately, the Democrats have not attempted to learn the lesson and then instead have been embarked on this crazy anti-Russia crusade as if that is going to improve their fortunes in 2018 and 2020.
Right.
Well, and, you know, this is the thing about it, too.
And I mean, they have a criminal investigations now.
I don't know, but I don't think the American people are very impressed by this.
And, you know, they had already tried this and he still won the election anyway.
I mean, they use this all summer long in 2016.
Russia, Russia, Russia.
Clinton said he was Putin's puppet and he was just like, yeah, right.
Yeah.
And the joke was then I think we probably even talked about it in the summer of 2016 that this doesn't stick because, you know, more or less they're red baiting him.
And yet, you know, he's not a commie traitor.
He's this red, white and blue capitalist billionaire skyscraper tycoon from Manhattan.
You know what I mean?
He can't be red.
He can't put Russia first.
It just that's not going to stick because it's stupid.
And any American can figure out that that doesn't make any sense.
You know, that somehow Putin decided he was going to put Trump in the presidency of all likely things, you know, way back when and all this stuff.
The whole thing is cooked up nonsense.
And I think that I mean, I guess they'll end up prosecuting the daughter or the son in law for some money laundering and stuff like that.
But as far as all this treason during the campaign, it's obviously ridiculous.
And and as story after story falls apart, all of Trump's base, they just don't even listen to it anymore at all.
Oh, yes.
CNN's accusing him of something.
Tell me another one.
Well, the thing that again, the thing that Democrats also don't seem to understand is that.
When CNN and MSNBC decided to launch, you know, this year long.
Russia jihad, you know, trying to tie Trump to to Putin, you know.
They they cheer when when when when when they see mainstream media outlets dumping on Trump, that helps Trump.
Well, they don't seem to understand that.
And of course, there's there's very little to there's no substance behind these accusations.
I mean, that ridiculous Steele dossier claims that the that the Russians had been working Trump as an intelligence asset since 2011 when he was the host of Celebrity Apprentice.
You know, I mean, Trump, Trump has absolutely and also he's met with very little success in his real estate ventures in Russia.
So, you know, there seems to be no there there, though, I suspect that the recommendation from Mueller will probably try to get him on obstruction charges.
But.
I think, again, if we're going to be consistent, Bill Clinton was it was recommended, you know, that he be charged with perjury and obstruction and the Democrats didn't didn't buy it.
So, I mean, I think all presidents should be impeached and removed.
So whatever.
But you're right, though.
I mean, the whole thing is obviously a frame up.
And it's it's a Hillary Clinton temper tantrum is what it is more than anything else.
Of course, it is.
Which is my favorite part of it, to be honest.
That's the part I like.
All right.
So now East-West accord in all of this, since all this, you know, rigging our election stuff is nonsense.
Let's get to the core of the issue.
What's the core of the issue?
The core of the issue is American national security.
Just the question that these people who have been hawking this Trump-Russia hysteria that is so consumed the beltway.
So what people should ask themselves is, is the United States and is the world a safer place if the United States and Russia can find a way to cooperate on issues like terrorism and nuclear nonproliferation?
Or.
Is the world better off if the U.S. and Russia are enemies of one another, as as we were during the 40 year Cold War?
It seems to me that the answer is obvious.
But to say that cooperation with Russia is in U.S. national security interests is something that certainly.
You know, when you know, it's from the from the establishment.
But that's the core issue.
Yeah.
All right.
So now.
I don't know, I'm I'm completely utopian.
I think that you could abolish NATO and drop all sanctions and just insist that everybody have as open trade relations with everybody as possible.
And let's all try our best to get along, even though we think you smell funny, we can't understand what you say.
Isn't that good enough?
Or would that mean that?
Oh, yeah, sure.
Disarm us so that the so that Putin can recreate the Soviet Union and conquer all of Eastern and maybe even Western Europe.
You fool.
Well, that's the argument that that's the argument.
Worryingly, that's the argument made by very sophisticated people.
They actually seem to believe their own propaganda.
But I wish they would just simply take a step back and think about the consequences of this.
And it's not going to be good.
Well, I mean, from their point of view, the consequences would be the Russians enslaving all of Europe.
So we've got to stop them no matter the cost.
And and you know what?
I think you're right that they believe it because I see discussion about, oh, my God, when when Russian when the Russians invade Estonia, what will America's reaction be?
It's not even if it's just a win, you know, this kind of thing.
What is our action plan for when the invasion begins?
And of course, they begin in the middle of the story.
Right.
They don't begin at the beginning.
They make they simply just discount the idea that NATO expansion has a lot to do with the way Russia acts.
In December, you probably know this, the National Security Archive at GW released 30 cables, an official memorandum from the from the late 80s and early 1990s that conclusively prove that George H.W. Bush and other Western leaders promised Gorbachev that NATO wouldn't move eastward.
And we violated that repeatedly.
And the Russians remember that.
And if you bring that up today among people who are in good standing with the establishment, they simply discount it.
But that's it's very important to understand that back history.
It didn't.
Putin's aggressive or aggressive.
I think it's more of a defensive posture, but whatever.
It has a lot to do with those broken promises.
And it has a lot to do with the bombing of Serbia in 1999.
But we discount all that.
Putin is evil.
And that's the end of the story.
If we can get back to Kosovo in just one second, but I want to get to just NATO expansion in general here, because I think this is such an important point.
And I mentioned this to someone not long ago or showed them the article or something and just minds blown.
It's this great article from 2007 by Richard Cummings.
And it's on my website and it's on the CorpWatch website and a few others.
It was originally written for Playboy.com and it's called Lockheed stock and two smoking barrels.
And I'll try to say it really fast here.
Basically, there was some plane, I always forget the name of it, that they tried to sell to Delta and American Airlines in the 70s and nobody wanted it because they bought the DC whatever the hell instead.
And so that was it.
They had spent billions of dollars developing this plane that nobody wanted.
And so they said, man, we don't want to compete in the free market anymore.
This sucks.
And so what they did was they decided we're just going to make weapons for the army and we're going to have this captive market and that's going to be our thing now, the Pentagon.
But then they had another meeting a few years later, another corporate board meeting where they said, you know, it would be a lot easier to determine which weapons to invest in developing to sell to the military if we knew what their policy was going to be.
So let's create their policy.
And that was how the Committee for NATO Expansion was born.
It was the Lockheed vice president, Bruce Jackson, that went and created the Committee to Expand NATO and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in order to simply put Lockheed shareholders on welfare and send them dividend checks out of your pocket.
And that was the whole scam.
They didn't even.
And I'm sure Strobe Talbot and all them had their fever dreams about what to do with the Russians.
You talk about that.
But at the bottom line, this thing is simply a welfare program for people who are already stinking rich making weapons.
Yeah, there's the profit motive.
And then, of course, there's the ideological motive as well.
It's that bipartisan impulse, this belief that the United States, as Madeleine Albright infamously said, stands taller, sees sees further.
That's funny.
So Strobe Talbot in 1992 wrote that it's the birth of the global nation and soon we'll have a one world government and all nations, including the United States, will be answerable to it.
And then Bill Clinton hired him and put him in.
I forgot exactly what all his positions were during that time.
But I know that at some point he went from, you know, let's ally with the Russians and invite them into NATO and have a one world army of the north and all of this to which is what I thought they were going to do to.
Then he said, no, let's just keep expanding NATO in a way that ultimately, obviously threatened Russia like what you're talking about.
And, you know, I'm trying to remember now.
It may have been you who instructed me, in fact, but somebody was explaining that he was the guy more than anyone who really promoted this and that George Kennan was criticizing in 1998 when he told Thomas Friedman that these guys who say, don't worry, the Russians won't mind.
This is just fine.
Are the same guys who, when this backfires and the Russians react, are going to say, see, this is why we need to do it because these terrible Russians are so aggressive.
And that was what George Kennan predicted.
And that was who he was talking about.
So now Strobe Talbot was the guy.
He was one of the guys that was on that study in I'm pretty sure it was 2015, but it could have been 14.
I think it was 2015 where they put out that report demanding the arming of the Ukrainian military at war in the east in the Donbass region there at the time and saying that we just want to do this just to provoke the Russians.
We want to kill Russians.
We know we've got Russian special forces helping these guys over there on the other side, and we want to make their costs of intervention go up.
And it's completely reckless, crazy stuff.
So I was just wondering, and I don't know if you want to pick on that guy specifically or how much you even know about him, but I wonder if you can talk about the evolution of America's post-Cold War Russia doctrine and whether these guys are supposed to be our friends or whether, you know, the plan ultimately is what?
Regime change and fracture Russia into a hundred pieces?
We'd have a nuclear war first.
So what the hell?
Or is there a grand design or any kind of long-term real agenda way of seeing things here or not?
Is it just that Putin is such a bad man and that's what I'm overlooking?
I think that's part of it.
I mean, they seem to be under the delusion that there is someone waiting in the wings who is a liberal westernizing leader that is preferable to Putin.
They are very enthusiastic about Alexei Navalny, who's an anti-corruption crusader.
But when they talk about someone like Navalny, what they leave out is that Navalny is basically racist and he's called for the expulsion of Muslims from Russia, which would be quite a task given the fact that there's about 20, 25 million Muslims in Russia.
You were talking about, you know, how did this evolve?
And it's right.
It began in the 90s and Strobe Talbot was Bill Clinton's.
They were classmates at Oxford.
They were longtime friends.
Talbot was a distinguished Russianist.
He translated Khrushchev's memoirs as a young man.
He was a correspondent, a very dovish, as you said, a very dovish correspondent, pro detente for Time Magazine.
That is until he took up a position of power in the Clinton administration.
He rose to become deputy secretary of state and he is largely responsible for the policy of NATO expansion.
And Bill Clinton actually read, you mentioned Kennan, Bill Clinton read that Thomas Friedman column in which Friedman interviewed Kennan and Kennan saw what was going to happen.
It's called, by the way, Googlers, it's called.
And now a word from X.
Sorry, go ahead.
Right.
And that right.
That refers to Kennan's one time pen name, Mr. X, when he wrote the famous article in Foreign Affairs, which was based on his long telegram.
But anyway.
So there were Clinton advisers like Strobe Talbot and Steven Sestanovich in and around 1997 were warned that NATO expansion would probably have unpleasant consequences for U.S.-Russia relations down the line.
The most prominent of those critics was, of course, George, George F. Kennan, who we've been talking about.
And if you read Strobe Talbot's memoir called The Russia Hand, he writes about this.
He says that he received a letter from George Kennan warning me that he was about to go public with his opposition to NATO enlargement.
He called it the greatest mistake of Western policy in the post Cold War era.
And the article that you mentioned written by it was there was an interview with Thomas Friedman.
And then Kennan himself wrote an op ed in The New York Times in February of 1997 called A Fateful Error.
And it was it stated very clearly his opposition to NATO expansion.
And as it happened, that article made its way to Bill Clinton, who read it.
And he asked Talbot, he said, and this is in Talbot's memoir.
Why isn't Kennan right?
The president asked when I entered the Oval Office.
Isn't he a kind of guru of yours going back to when we were at Oxford?
And Talbot's response is very telling.
He said, he said, yes, Kennan had been and always would be someone I admired, but not as a source of all wisdom.
Kennan had opposed the formation of NATO in the first place, I said.
So it was no great surprise that he opposed its enlargement.
And so with that, they dispensed with Kennan's objections and pursued this policy, which has had rather disastrous consequences for him.
And for U.S.-Russia relations in the decades following.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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All right.
Now, just real quick, I want to point out this.
I haven't had a chance to read the book yet here.
William Perry's memoirs about the danger of nuclear weapons that he's written now.
But there's a review of it by Jerry Brown, the governor of California, in the New York Review of Books.
And there's one paragraph where he's talking about 1996 here.
And he says, so a couple of years even before that part.
He says, a prominent group of 50 leading Americans, both conservative and liberal, signed a letter to President Bill Clinton opposing NATO expansion.
Among the signers were Robert McNamara, Sam Nunn, Bill Bradley, Paul Nitze.
So this is now Kennan.
He's the guy that said containment instead of rollback.
Nitze was the guy who said rollback.
He was the harder core Cold Warrior.
And here he is also agreed, along with Richard Pipes, who was, of course, a hardcore anti-communist hawk.
But now communism is gone.
And John Holdren, I'm not certain who that is.
But anyway, this is...
And Perry was the Secretary of Defense.
So the Secretary of Defense and Nitze and McNamara were telling him not to do it.
He wasn't just ignoring Kennan.
He was ignoring...
In other words, his right flank was completely covered if he wanted to say no to this.
He could have said, listen, I have guys who are typically real hawkish types who are saying that this would be an unwise move.
And he went ahead anyway.
That's exactly right.
And that sort of bipartisan consensus for a realistic policy vis-a-vis Russia probably died shortly after that.
I mean, in the years following, the establishment has become virulently anti-Russian.
And a lot of that has to do with Putin's opposition to the Iraq war.
And then four years later, Putin's famous speech in Munich where he decried American unilateralism and said that we were frequently violating international law.
And when he did that, the establishment no longer had any use for him.
And this was someone who was actually praised very early on when he took over for Yeltsin.
Even Madeleine Albright said at the time that she dismissed all the concern at the time about Putin's KGB background.
So I think that his outspokenness to some of our ventures abroad and, of course, some of the very real problems such as corruption and human rights abuses in his own country have played into this new Cold War that we find ourselves in.
Yeah.
Now, I mean, that's the whole thing about it, right?
Is people are always going to say, you want a cord?
Well, you're a traitor for the other side or something like that.
But it seems like anybody who's not a government employee ought to be able to just ask, well, hey, what's our government's role in making things worse, not better here?
And what could be done better?
And then you look at it, and of course, it's all the empire's fault.
They lost the Cold War.
Their empire completely fell apart with some shots being fired.
But compared to what it could have been, had they desperately tried to hang on to their Eastern European territories, it could have been an absolute massacre.
And instead, they just gave it up.
The whole thing was over.
It seems like the Americans were obligated at that point to be good sports about it instead of rubbing their face in it.
Well, it seems to me that in the 90s, there was a real failure of imagination.
I mean, if you think about the world and the way that American policymakers responded to the new world that emerged in the mid to late 1940s, they were fairly inventive.
They created new institutions to try to respond to the new realities.
But nothing similar like that happened in the 1990s.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was a new world.
But instead, they hung on to the old institutions.
And I very much include NATO in that.
And it seems to me that there was a real failure of imagination by policymakers like Talbot and like Clinton at the time.
And we're paying the price for it.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
I think it's really worthy a note.
And I think mostly people don't really know this.
But it's kind of illuminating that you had this whole group of paleo-conservatives, like Pat Buchanan and Jude Winooski, who were both, I mean, Winooski was a former neocon himself.
Pat, of course, was just a right-wing conservative.
But they said, hey, the emergency's over.
World communism is dead.
And so let's abolish NATO and let's be a republic, not an empire.
And Chalmers Johnson, you could throw him in here, too.
Chalmers Johnson said when the American empire didn't disband in 91, but only expanded, he said he had been a spear carrier for empire this whole time.
And he had to go back and examine his premises.
And he realized that he, in his new estimation, the Cold War was just a scam and an excuse for American imperial aggression all along.
Not that the Soviets were innocent, but that the Americans were, you know, taking advantage of a situation in order to expand their own power and influence in ways that really had nothing to do with protecting us from communism.
And no wonder then that the empire didn't disband after the excuse for it fell apart.
They just found new excuses.
In fact, remember for a while they had to settle for Pablo Escobar and the cocaine smugglers of Latin America.
Like, we needed an entire Pentagon for that.
Then it was, you know, David Koresh, and then they'd get back to Iraq again soon enough.
And who is it going to be next week, I wonder?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, let's hope not Iran or North Korea for all the problems that could come with that.
And let's hope especially it's not the Russians.
So now, let me ask you this before I let you go, because this is kind of really the point.
It's been said, I'll give you an example.
My friend Eric Margulies, he's always had, for a long time I guess, known people in high levels of politics and influence in France.
You know, military guys and spies and diplomats and these kinds of people.
You know, he's got connections to their fancy parties and what have you, I guess.
And so he's talked to these people, you know, and I remember him saying back during, not that it's completely over, but during the worst of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, 2015, this kind of thing, I guess it would have been 2014, that they were saying to him, this is the worst it's been since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and something's got to give.
You know, it's like it's on autopilot and nobody's, you know, even checking.
We're just on this path toward an ultimate conflict here with the Russians.
That's what he's driving.
And now, look, Trump's the one driving, of all things.
And he has to prove daily that he's not a puppet of the Russians, too, which is a pretty bad incentive to add to the mix here, if you ask me.
So I just wonder, you know, I don't like alarmist talk, but then when it's the people who are the French deep state expressing these kind of concerns, it makes me at least want to listen for a minute.
That's just one example, of course.
But what do you think about all that?
What level of crisis is this?
It's exceedingly dangerous and no one seems to be paying attention.
We have a three or four front new Cold War with the Russians.
We have, our troops are nose to nose in the Baltics, in Ukraine, where in the western part of the country, we all know that the Russians are helping out in the east.
In the western part of the country, the U.S. has a base there, and in Syria.
And you could argue, I suppose, that we are, you could add a cyber element to that.
That would be the fourth element.
So again, we go back to the question, I think, you know, that I asked earlier on.
Is U.S., are U.S. national security interests enhanced?
Or are they not?
If we find a way to cooperate with the Russians.
This isn't to absolve Vladimir Putin, or to suggest that, you know, he has been far from blameless in all of this.
But we might be better served to look at things in a little bit more of a realistic manner than we currently are.
Yeah.
Got that right.
You're great at the understatement, James.
And you're a great writer.
I really appreciate all your efforts.
And thanks again for your time on the show.
That's very kind.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that is the great James Carden.
He's at the Center for East-West Accord.
And read him at The Nation.
So he's got this new one.
And a new poll shows that the public is overwhelmingly opposed to the endless military interventions.
And, of course, yeah, he's good on Russia, too.
And I'm Scott Horton.
Find my stuff at scotthorton.org.
Antiwar.com.
I'm the opinion editor there, so read what everybody else writes there.
Check out my institute at libertarianinstitute.org.
And read my book, Fool's Errand.
It's at foolserrand.us.
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Thanks, guys.
