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.
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All right, you guys, introducing Jack Matlock, the second to last ambassador to the USSR, and writing here now for the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord, that's at usrussiaaccord.org, and we also reprinted it at antiwar.com as well.
Today's crisis over Ukraine was predictable and avoidable.
It even has a little poem at the beginning.
An avoidable crisis that was predictable, actually predicted, willfully precipitated, but easily resolved by the application of common sense.
Very nice.
Welcome back to the show, Jack.
How are you, sir?
Glad to be with you.
I'm just fine.
Great.
So, big crisis in Russian Ukraine.
You've been in on this story for a very long time here, of course.
Just this last Christmas, we celebrated the 30-year anniversary of the very final end of the Soviet Union.
The red flag came down, and the very last of the republics even were set free.
And now here we are 30 years later, and we've got this big crisis, and they say that Putin is Hitler and he's going to take over Eastern Europe if we don't stop him at Ukraine.
And so I wonder what you think people need to know about this.
The floor is yours, sir.
Well, first of all, I cannot imagine that Russia is actually going to invade Ukraine in the sense of bombing the country or taking things over.
And if they do so, I know that would be a disaster not only for Ukraine, but for Russia itself.
They're simply not in Russia's interest.
Therefore, I do think that there is not a danger of the sort of attack that our media seems to be predicting almost every day.
And when the day passes and it doesn't happen, well, it's going to be tomorrow.
I think that what there are two or three basic things we need to bear in mind.
First of all, I think it was a very big mistake to start expanding NATO in the late 90s at a time when after the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, there was no threat to the countries in Eastern Europe.
And by expanding NATO and militarizing it, not just expanding NATO, but also placing military bases in the new countries was bound to be provocative of Russia, as long as you left Russia out.
So in the 1990s, we should have encouraged a security structure in Europe that included Russia and was not designed to divide the continent.
And particularly, it should have taken military action out of the, you might say, the political equation.
I think that was clearly in the United States' interest.
Now, that didn't happen.
NATO began expanding and kept on, kept on.
One thing should have been certain to anybody with any close knowledge of history is that no Russian government could prevent areas like or countries like Ukraine or Georgia, which for centuries had been part of Russia, to join a military alliance hostile to Russia.
Now, we should understand that.
How have we Americans felt about foreign intrusions in our neighborhood?
And by the way, we have declared that our neighborhood is the whole Western Hemisphere.
Now, and I'm reminded of the one time we came very close to an exchange of nuclear weapons.
That was the Cuban Missile Crisis back in 1962.
I was assigned to the American embassy then and actually translated some of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's letters to President John Kennedy.
Now, we talk a lot now about sovereignty, the enviability of borders, and that the country should be able to choose anything it wishes.
But I would say that what happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis was that Cuba asked the Soviet Union to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter an American attack.
Now, Cuba was a sovereign country and Khrushchev, knowing that the United States without publicity had actually stationed nuclear missiles in Turkey that could reach the Soviet Union, thought, well, what's goose?
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
We'll give them a little place to their own medicine.
That was a horribly dangerous mistake because quite normally, Kennedy immediately saw the threat and saw that it was simply something the United States was not going to tolerate.
We didn't start talking about international law and so on.
We simply said that we've got to remove those missiles.
The Joint Chiefs said, well, let's bomb them.
And fortunately, Kennedy didn't do that.
Instead, he declared an embargo around Cuba, sent the Navy around and publicly demanded that Khrushchev remove the nuclear missiles.
Well, there was a lot of tension.
And finally, after about 10 days of back and forth, Khrushchev announced that he would remove those missiles.
Kennedy had agreed secretly, on condition it not be announced, that we would subsequently remove our missiles from Turkey.
It's interesting that he made very clear that this could not be announced publicly.
So Khrushchev had to accept what looked like a public back down when actually we had made a deal.
Now, at the time, those of us involved, as I said, I was sitting in the American embassy in Moscow.
Many people thought, you know, we would probably be in the center of the first American missile that was fired, if there was a...
I'm not sure about that.
But what we learned later was that we came very close to precipitating a nuclear attack on the United States.
Because we learned later that the commanders, I'd say the colonel in charge of the missiles, could have launched those missiles if they had come under attack.
So we could have lost Miami and maybe other cities suddenly, if that had happened.
Also, we learned later that when an American destroyer, a task force, was forcing a Soviet submarine to stay submerged when it needed to come up for air, the commander of the submarine actually ordered an attack on the destroyer with a nuclear torpedo, which would have probably taken out the whole task force in that immediate thing.
Fortunately, he was overruled by a superior officer.
So since then, we learned that, you know, it is really dangerous to confront another nuclear power.
And that there is simply nothing to be gained and almost everything to be lost by dealing with these things by military means.
Now, it does seem to me that I can't be sure what's going to happen in Ukraine.
But I know that Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
We have no obligation to defend Ukraine.
I also know that Ukraine itself is deeply divided.
And though Russia may be using some of those divisions, it seems to me that the United States should recognize that we ourselves have used similar tactics in the past.
And that these are issues which are not going to be solved by military force and by threatening military force.
But even by threatening military force, we raise the stakes and that this could easily lead at the very least to a new nuclear arms race.
So that it does seem to me that what President Putin is asking for, that is assurance that Ukraine and Georgia will never be part of NATO, is not unreasonable.
We would certainly react if Russia or China or even some of our friends started putting military bases in the Caribbean or in Mexico.
Why can't we understand that this is an issue and that it is dangerous to hype it?
So that's essentially the point I'm trying to make.
It does seem to me that what President Putin is asking for is something that that we could easily accommodate, because it is certainly not in NATO's interest or the United States to have a country like Ukraine, which is itself deeply divided, having them, in effect, to confront a nuclear power over who controls it.
I think that is simply not wise.
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Right.
Now, I wonder about the gap between your wisdom and your narrative versus that of contemporary politics in Washington, D.C. here.
And I know that oftentimes in real time, there's a gap between some responsible professionals in the State Department or in the Senate versus all the screaming on TV.
And I know that in Biden's response to Putin's demands, which was leaked to the Spanish press and published two weeks ago, that there's a lot of bluster at the beginning.
But at the end, they say, we should negotiate a verification regime so that you guys can come and inspect our missile launchers in Romania and Poland and make sure they don't have Tomahawk missiles in them and this kind of thing.
And so, in other words, when it comes down to real business, it seems like there is some willingness to do real business.
But then again, the economics of politics in Washington, D.C., say that Putin is Hitler.
And you can't appease Hitler like Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938 or else the next thing you know, he'll be marching into Paris, France.
And so you can't be soft on communism.
You can't be soft on terrorism.
You can't be soft on this madman, Putin.
And that narrative is a very strong countervailing wind to what you're saying, which is perfectly reasonable, which is, geez, we're not bringing Ukraine into NATO anyway.
Why don't we just write that down somewhere and be done with this?
So I wonder how you think that can be resolved here, or if you think maybe there's momentum behind the adult point of view rather than the political one at all, maybe now?
Yes.
Well, I certainly agree, if under cover of all this rhetoric and what I think, you know, that sort of hyper reaction to something that hasn't happened yet, and in my mind, almost certainly will not happen.
That is a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
We are negotiating, and we have said, and this has been publicized, that we will begin to negotiate such things as strategic stability and also verification.
If, in fact, we begin to address some of the, what I think, legitimate Russian concerns, legitimate in the sense of how they perceive things, that if under the cover of all this rhetoric, we do come, in effect, to an acceptable way to ease off this, then I will be happy to, you know, compliment the Biden administration and Biden for dealing with what is, I think, a very difficult internal situation in the United States to bring about a rational end.
I hope that's what's going to happen.
Now, as far as the whole Munich analogy, I would say I think this has been repeatedly misused.
It was used to keep us in Vietnam.
Think of how many lives that lost, and the idea being, oh, you've got to stop the communists there because first you have communist Soviet Union and then communist China, and then if Vietnam goes communist, they'll all be controlled by Moscow, and then the dominoes will fall in Southeast Asia.
That didn't happen, but we lost, my God, how many lives?
Look at that monument in Washington.
And okay, now we've got, yes, the communist party eventually took over all of Vietnam, but they were nationalists, just as the Chinese are nationalists.
They're not Russian stooges, and therefore the whole analogy that we use, that Munich analogy, was used to actually do the opposite of what we should have done, looking back.
Now, I say this as one who at the time supported the war in Vietnam precisely on that analogy, but now I can see very clearly how mistaken it was, and to see it continually applied to situations which are basically quite different is rather distressing.
Yeah, I certainly agree about that.
Now, I usually would never do this, but I think I really want to in this case, if it's okay with you, if I can page down and find it.
Yes, here it is right here.
I want to read what you quote in here, your statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1997, and I'm trying to think now if that would have been, was Biden the chair, or he would have been the co-chair at that time of that committee, sir, do you remember?
Yes, he was the ranking.
The Jesse Helms was chairman, and he was the minority member, the senior Democrat.
Right.
Okay.
And then the statement reads, this is 97, you guys, quote, I consider the administration's recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided.
If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War.
Far from improving the security of the United States, its allies, and the nations that wish to enter the alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.
Pretty impressive prediction there, but you were not alone, right?
George Kennan and Paul Nitze and even Robert McNamara was saying the same thing at the time, is that right?
That's right.
And George Kennan said the same thing.
Even, you know, some of the, almost everyone that helped us negotiate the end of the Cold War said the same thing.
Well, that's an interesting way to put it.
Almost everyone who had helped to negotiate an end of the Cold War.
In fact, I think I learned recently that Brent Scowcroft, known as Bush Senior's alter ego, which I think it was taken for granted that when he spoke after, you know, in the Clinton years, that when he spoke, he was speaking for Bush Senior, that he recommended against it too.
Is that right?
You know, I think that's likely, I don't remember it specifically.
I would have to check before I...
Okay, fair enough, fair enough.
But so, it's really interesting because, you know, I was paying attention to politics at the time, but I was not aware that there were so many real experts pushing back on NATO expansion.
It seemed to me that the consensus in Congress and, you know, between Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton essentially was, yes, let's do this.
And it just skated right through, but it didn't seem to break through in the popular narrative that all of our grayest gray beards are telling us that this is a major error.
And so, what was it exactly, if you could go back then, what was it that you had in mind that made this so obviously an error?
I mean, it's obviously, hindsight is one thing, but from your point of view back then, what was it that you thought was going to happen here?
Well, there were two things, more than two, but I would name two principal things.
First was that, as I've said before, if you start adding countries one by one to NATO without doing that in the context of a European security structure that included Russia, which at that point was, I mean, it was not the Soviet Union.
The breakup of the Soviet Union meant that Russia ended up with only half the population.
And in the 90s, its military was totally demoralized and ineffective.
And even the last Soviet leader, Gorbachev, had welcomed the democratic governments in Eastern Europe, so that even at the end of the Soviet Union, those last two years of the Soviet Union's existence, it was not threatening Eastern Europe, but was facilitating the democratization.
So one thing is, I said, if you start expanding NATO, you are going to redivide Europe.
And we don't need that.
The second was that, weak as it was at the time, Russia is a nuclear power.
And in terms of the effectiveness of the weapons they had, they were certainly on par with us.
And I recalled the experience during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And I said, we don't want to put ourselves in a position of having a military confrontation with another nuclear power.
That is simply not in our interest.
It's not in Europe's interest.
And so those were the two of the most important reasons.
I would also add that at the time, we had a proposal going called the Partnership for Peace.
That included everybody.
We also had an organization, which frankly still exists, and could have been beefed up, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which included Russia, which included all the European countries.
And that should have been the aim, to have a structure so that you would not have, you know, future military confrontations.
Now, but in dealing with Russia, it wasn't just a NATO expansion.
By the second Bush administration, George W. Bush, you had the United States withdrawing from some of the basic arms control treaties that we had used with the Soviet Union.
The ABM Treaty, one that had been concluded by President Nixon, ratified by overwhelming vote, both Republicans and Democrats.
You know, when I was in the government, politics stopped at the water's edge, as we put it.
And every one of these arms control agreements were bipartisan, in the sense that we got them.
And yet, one by one, we began to step out of them.
And the message to Russia was, you don't count anymore.
Then increasingly, we found that our media began to, I would say, demonize the Russian president.
Now, I would say in that, and I think even Henry Kissinger, at one point, pointed out that demonization of Vladimir Putin is no substitute for policy.
It seems to be, certainly on the part of a lot of the media.
And it's not my part to defend what he has done or what he is doing.
I think many of the things he is doing is not in Russia's interest, and it's threatening.
And I think this should be a real problem for Russians.
But I also perceive that much of what he's doing is a reaction to what we're doing.
You can call it an overreaction, or whatnot.
And I also am pretty clear that it doesn't really threaten us or any of our vital interests.
And I think we should start thinking about what is in the interest of the United States.
What is actually in the interest of our allies?
Why are they allied with us if we're not going to act in their interest?
And certainly, their interest is not to have a military confrontation in Europe, one involving nuclear powers on both sides.
That's not in Europe's interest.
That's not in democracy's interest.
And I would say on that, it's fine to say we're supporting democracy.
But, you know, if you're seen as interfering in another country's politics, you tend to become an enemy.
And therefore, you're not supporting democracy, you're bringing about a reaction, which will create the opposite in the other country.
I think it was, you know, it seems clear to me that if we want to spread democracy abroad, we have to show how well it works here.
And quite frankly, it's not working all that great.
And probably mostly because we've been at war, and are an overextended empire, bestriding the world.
And this is what happens to all empires, is they kill themselves, if they're not just outright conquered by their enemies, which we're pretty safe here in North America.
But you can definitely see the self-inflicted, you know, slow death here, as we expend all of our efforts bossing everybody else around in Eurasia, for crying out loud.
Well, I think you have something there.
I have often said, with a lot of other people, that, you know, monopoly is bad.
And it's even bad for the monopolist.
Right.
Because eventually, it brings about pressures that tear it apart.
Right.
All right, well, listen, I'm so- The attempt to be the world's lawgiver, judge, executioner, in other words, an imperial power.
First of all, it's not going to work.
And second, it's having a very negative feedback at home.
Yep, absolutely.
Yes, monopoly is bad, even for the monopolist.
And an attempt to exercise a monopoly of power in the world is going to come back and hit us, as it is, I think, now in many ways.
All right, you guys, that is former ambassador Jack Matlock, the second-to-last ambassador to the Soviet Union.
And he wrote this important piece.
We published it at Antiwar.com.
It started out at ACIRA, the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord.
And here at Antiwar.com, it's called Today's Crisis Over Ukraine Was Predictable and Avoidable.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show, Jack.
Appreciate it.
Glad to be here.
Thanks for the invitation.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
