Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright, so I'll introduce you to Gilbert Doctorow.
He is a political analyst based in Brussels.
And his latest book is titled, Does Russia Have a Future?
And we run him from time to time at antiwar.com.
The latest is Putin on national defense.
Threats or a bid to negotiate on arms control.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gilbert?
It's a pleasure to be with you again.
Very happy to have you here.
And I should mention the second piece.
I forget if it's published today or it's coming out this weekend.
Is part two of this about guns and butter.
But it's Putin's big speech that he gave.
This is his, essentially the State of the Union speech over there that he does every year.
Is that right?
That's correct.
This was his 15th edition.
Okay.
That's quite a long presidency.
So, yeah, national defense.
You say that most of the speech was about domestic policy.
But then he got to the tough part.
So what do you have to say?
Well, his foreign policy section was the last 10% of his speech.
And that was a very brief mention of Russia's priority partnerships and discussions and negotiations across the world.
And then he stopped and went into the issue that was foremost on his mind, which was the United States withdrawal from the INF Treaty, which goes back to 1987 and is one of the great achievements in the Gorbachev-Reagan summits.
It was a part of the architecture of arms control.
And even if it's a bit outdated, it was viewed by the Russians as significant because it was a proof of mutual confidence and of an ongoing dialogue with the United States, which is now absent.
So Putin's remarks were to follow up on what happened a week earlier when the United States withdrew.
As Pompeo said, yes, we give notice that in six months we will be out of this treaty.
And two days later, the Russians said they also would exercise their option to leave the treaty.
Now, that was a perfunctory formality statement.
What Putin did now was to explain what this really means.
And he was unusually tough.
And his language in the whole speech was conversational.
I have translated part of the speech as it pertains to the United States and to this INF Treaty.
And if you look at particularly my translation, not the formal translation, the cleaned-up translation that was issued by the Kremlin, ruled by the president's office, what he actually delivered and said, it was definitely conversational, sometimes folksy, and sometimes very idiomatic in a way that really tickled the fancy of his Russian audience.
I'll get to that in a minute.
In other words, he was going off the script and saying some things that weren't in the text as published.
Absolutely.
And what was off the script, what was not really represented in the formal language of the presidential administration's translation of his speech, was his great disparagement of Europe and his concentration on relationships really with one country only in the world for matters of security, and that's the United States.
What he said that was disparaging and which tickled the fancy of his audience, they were beaming and plodding, was that the United States has not done the honest thing, which George W. Bush did in 2002 when it withdrew from the ABM Treaty, and it just said, that's it, we don't feel this serves our purposes and we're leaving.
No, they didn't do that this time.
The United States started accusing Russia of violations to justify the United States leaving this treaty.
And that, from the perspective of Putin, was totally dishonest because the United States, from the Russian perspective, has been in violation of that treaty for almost 10 years.
In what way?
Well, in what way the negotiation on creating what are called missile defense bases in Romania and in Poland were seen from the very first announcement going back to 2003-2004, they were seen by the Russians as laying the basis for a violation of the INF Treaty, because they understood that the launchers that were being installed in these two bases were dual purpose.
And within half an hour of reprogramming, they could turn from being a quite acceptable and legal missile defense functionality to being a launcher of cruise missiles within a range that is in direct violation of the treaty.
And these missiles are not a hypothetical or a planned development by the states.
They were taking the Aegis system and launching, which is capable of launching tomahawks from naval vessels, and they were putting it on land.
So the Russians didn't, felt that they were being abused, and they've been complaining off and on for the last 10 years about this.
Without, to no effect, the United States went right ahead and brought the Romanian base up to operational level, and they are close to completing a Polish base.
And by the way, there's an article about this, you may be partially referring to this article in the New York Times today by Theodore Postol.
And people might remember him as the MIT rocket scientist who debunked two of the three chemical weapons attacks in Syria, and was cited by Seymour Hersh and so forth.
We talked to him about Contra Coon on the show, and that's his piece today is the dual use nature.
And in fact, he says that Obama was duped about this, that Obama thought that, yeah, we're going to put in these interceptors and didn't really realize that.
Yeah, no, somebody in the Pentagon must have though, that this is about the ability to base tomahawk missiles there that they could arm with nukes and strike Russia at very short notice.
Which is actually kind of superfluous, assuming they can hit them from, I guess they want to be redundant in their powers, but they have submarines in the Baltics that can launch Polaris missiles and hit Moscow in no time anyway, right?
So the INF, in a sense, as you said, was outdated.
I don't know if this is what you're referring to, but in a way it was ceremonial because we can hit them with submarines at medium range rather than long range anyway, right?
One of the big criticisms of Gorbachev that has come to the surface in the last few years in Russian political discussions is that he was hacked.
And they understood very quickly that he was duped because the ban was on land-based, and the United States proceeded immediately to put equivalent functionality missiles on surface and submarines, as you say, in the Baltic Sea with an easy range of Russia.
Yes, so in a way, the threat of very short notification has existed for some time, but the availability of a land-based system is that it can multiply many times the number of missiles being fired at.
And this is an important part of the narrative that's really been left out, that America really started this.
And I just spoke with Chas Freeman a few hours ago, and he was explaining that a big part of this is, as I guess Putin is saying in his speech, I don't know if he mentioned China, but he was saying the Americans are looking for a pretext to leave this treaty.
On one hand, as you're saying, they've already been violating it without consequence up until now, so why do they want to leave it?
They want to leave it so they can put nukes in the Philippines and point them at China.
And so they're coming up with this excuse that it's provoking a fight with Russia, mutual withdrawal from this important medium-range nuclear missile treaty with the Russians, just so they can get away with escalating against the Chinese.
Well, Scott, one of the real problems with the shutdown in public discussion of these security issues in the United States is that an issue like the one we have on the table right now has many possible explanations, but you don't hear them because we're not talking.
So yes, the explanation you gave is one valid and is one potential explanation.
Another explanation is that Washington's intent is to drive a wedge between China and Russia on this, because the Russians, they would think in Washington, are very worried about the United States' cruise missiles being placed in very large numbers.
It's not onesies and twosies.
These would be several hundred.
The idea would be a massive attack which could not possibly be countered.
And you can do that from land in a way that you can't really do that from a submarine here and a frigate there.
So the possibility is that the Russians would get very nervous about these systems that are being put in by the states, and they would urge the Chinese to go along and to come along so that Trump would get what he wants or says he wants, that this treaty would be renewed, but it would be extended to include the Chinese.
At the same time, about 90% of all of the nuclear capability of the Chinese is in precisely this range of missiles.
So the Russians and the Chinese would have different interests on that question, and I think it is a reasonable alternative explanation to what you just mentioned a minute ago, to see this as a wedge used by Washington, hoping to drive the Russians and the Chinese apart.
Yeah.
In fact, I read that even this new missile that the Russians are fielding that the Americans say is a violation, which the Russians say that, you know, no, the limit is 400 and we're below that and what have you, that even those, even assuming the worst about them, I guess, for the sake of argument, that they're deployed along their southern flank with China rather than being, I mean, and that could change, I guess, hypothetically.
But there doesn't seem to have been any effort by the Russians to install these things facing west.
It was all about China because after all, they're right near each other at medium range.
What do they need with three stage ICBMs, right?
Well, just looking at what's happened in the last week and what Putin said, which some American media understood properly as threats, this is a change in tone.
It's a, I think that he was much stronger than he was a year ago when he first rolled out these systems and making it explicit that Russia is ready for anything the United States might be cooking up.
And Russia has already run its arms race and Russia can believe that it has completed its side of the arms race and is ahead of the United States.
So some of our media have understood that these were serious threats.
Other parts of the media don't know what to do with it.
And this was something that I brought up.
That was the central feature of my follow-on article that you mentioned a few minutes ago, which was the guns are butter.
There wasn't so much the issue of guns are butter that I had in mind.
It was the interpretation of Putin's speech by the lead article in the New York Times.
New York Times does not know what to do about the INF Treaty.
They say they would like to see it continued, but they don't give a reasonable argument why it should be.
The reasonable argument would be is that we're going to blast it off the face of the earth if we let the Russians go ahead with their state-of-the-art weaponry and have no arms control discussion with them at all.
That is the strongest argument why we shouldn't leave the INF Treaty.
It opens the Pandora's box, which is the title of Postol's article.
That Theodore Postol was given space in the New York Times is itself an indication that they are stuck.
They don't know how to handle this question.
At the State of the Union address when Trump brought up withdrawing from the INF Treaty, I thought it was remarkable that all the Democrats sat on their hands.
Here he is doing everything he can to hawk it up against Russia for you, and they're not even grateful after all this.
What is it exactly that they want from him?
They won't be happy until he nukes Moscow and gets D.C. nuked in turn, is that it?
Well, I'm afraid you're right.
They really are caught in a dilemma.
They would like to say that the administration is correct, and the New York Times said that ceded the point that Trump is right, the Russians have been violating it.
And then it's tough to say, why are you going to continue with a country that you're otherwise bashing every day and speaking about as so much trash?
Russia obviously is not trash, but they don't want to come out and say that.
Still, I do have the feeling that the American public may have gotten a little whiff that there's something dangerous in the air, which a year ago they didn't get.
Because when Putin first rolled out these new weapons systems, there was such a hesitation in the West as to what to make of it.
And then finally there was a decision that the Russians really are bluffing, they don't have this stuff.
Or, as the New York Times article that had it both ways, the guns and butter question, the Russians don't have the money to do both.
And since Putin needs to do social programs to stay in power, because we know that his popularity ratings are falling terribly from 80% to 60%, he's going to have to put money into social programs, and he can't possibly afford an arms race with the United States.
Well, that's one way of giving yourself the reason not to take the issue seriously.
But somehow I think the broader parts of the American public are confused and just have a whiff that something dangerous is in this.
Is that how you see it, Scott?
Yeah, I mean, well, I don't know how awakened people are to the threat of it.
And you're right, though, I mean, it really was remarkable the way that they went from, wow, that sounds advanced enough to be scary, but not unbelievable, some of these new weapons that he was announcing last year.
And they went from that very quickly to, nah, he's bluffing, we don't have to worry about that.
And I saw some of these wonks on Twitter back then, you know, talking about that.
But, you know, I guess, and this is something I talked about with Charles Freeman, too, there really is an unreality where they talk about the possibility of war with Russia or China in a way where, of course, everybody knows that everybody has H-bombs, don't be stupid, right?
So it goes without saying that, yes, of course, everyone has H-bombs.
But because it goes without saying, it goes without mentioning ever.
No one ever says, yeah, but this is all just hypothetical, because in reality, we can never, ever, ever, ever have a war with China, because then we'd lose L.A. or worse.
And so that part never gets brought up.
And so I am afraid that in D.C. there really is one of these kind of bubble unrealities where they really entertain the discussions and the plans and the strategies for conventional war against these countries as though nukes weren't an issue.
And I know how bureaucrats are, too, where once these things are on paper and it's just kind of a thing, it's hard to undo it.
It's hard to get around that, well, this is our new concept that we're operating under, or whatever kind of jargon they have for what they're doing, you know.
So I think that's really the biggest danger.
Is that they kind of, they're in H-bomb denial, essentially.
Well, people are speaking about the sanctions from hell.
And it's nice to catch the news with terms like that.
And Americans are, not just Americans, Western Europe also is persuaded that economic warfare is just, is an alternative to kinetic warfare.
And what they are ignoring is that in our own past economic warfare became kinetic warfare.
We wouldn't have had Pearl Harbor if we hadn't been waging a fierce economic war against Japan to deny it access to raw materials.
Now, that's one thing.
So a trade war can become a real war.
And a conventional war can become a nuclear war.
And to think that Putin has said very straight that if the survival of Russia is in question, he will go nuclear.
Now, we had two days ago, one of the senior Pentagon officials was speaking at the Brookings Institute and describing a new technical possibility that the Pentagon hopes will get financed to the tune of $135 billion to, by stealth, move into either China or Russia and take them over by working through weaknesses in their defenses.
A kind of Trojan horse, which will cost $135 billion if Congress will put it in.
The problem with that magnificent technical objective is it ignores the fact that it just takes one finger on the button to respond to that type of knife to the jugular.
Conventional warfare can easily become nuclear warfare.
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check me out at antiwar.com scotthorton.org kpfk.org and libertarianinstitute.org um well and that's the whole thing you know i was just having this conversation uh about india and pakistan where so much of this fight over kashmir is just national pride it's completely stupid and unquantifiable and essentially worthless you know emotionalism by a bunch of grown-up babies that they can't just compromise about this kind of thing and it's also a flash point where a conventional battle could very quickly turn nuclear because neither side you know if they have nukes in reserve what are they going to do how many divisions are they going to lose before they bust one out i mean the whole thing's crazy well i'd just like to come back to the very start of our conversations i never did get say what was um so amusing to the russian audience in putin's speech he used a term which can be translated as the kind of oinking of little piglets it's a very farm type of type language and i mean there were two instances in his speech when putin was a kind of throwback to khrushchev which amused me tremendously because in in in writing about 10 days ago i had argued that the thing that was missing in putin's uh approach to us was threats he doesn't bang his shoe on the table like khrushchev did and he doesn't get her attention the attention of the broad public oh specialists yeah i've got thank you i really enjoyed that article you're saying if he would only raise his voice a little bit maybe people would pay attention instead he has this kind of deadpan thing which works real well on a guy like you or a guy like me who's reading closely in between the lines but to the rest of the people they just don't even notice what he says at all exactly well there were two points in his speech this past week which were straight khrushchev one was this little piglets now who were the piglets they were western europe um oinking their agreement with washington about there being russian violations of the imf to justify canceling it so the one the act for for russian patriots to hear the germans the french the italians the rest of them all described as little piglets that was for them a real moment of satisfaction the other moment that was khrushchev likened his speech in the middle of the speech describing that the the scientific achievements that russia is now experiencing he likened the development of this um avant-garde i think it's mach 5 mach 6 something um missile as a major achievement because it it will will operate within its own plasma envelope and that this this scientific breakthrough was symbols of the nature of russia's launch of sputnik well sputnik was launched under khrushchev and sputnik was awe-inspiring it changed american psychology about russia and about his place in the world and here putin was saying that they have just achieved something of similar significance well we'll see in the year ahead as they as they proceed to demonstrate how this this um avant-garde operates but these two throwbacks to khrushchev days i think were a little bit instrumental or useful in in raising the temperature to a point where people notice that the water's boiling well i mean yeah this is the whole thing right where the ideology of american empire comes up against the hard edge of reality and you know this is something that pat buchanan who's a big critic of the new cold war something he said all along was you know that when it really comes to push or shove do the americans really intend to go to war over estonia no and that actually you know the nato treaty can say whatever it wants but we're not going to trade denver and houston and miami and charlotte and dc and new york for you know tolin and and morsaw and what have you these things the line as pat buchanan says the line used to be drawn halfway across germany but now we've moved the line all the way to russia's border so on one hand that could be a real trip wire on the other hand we probably don't mean it it's probably the kind of thing where we can encourage um our satellites to act tough and get in fights where they expect that we'll back them up where at the end of the day we won't kind of like the uprising in hungary in 56 whatever right it's not just that we don't have the enthusiasm for estonians um it's that it is impossible to defend them you can have all the tripwires you want and that's all they are are tripwires they are not self-standing um units that could match the russian forces that are just across the border you just have to look at the map logistics tell you this is impossible for there to be a substantial resistance to any russian invasion of the baltics and russians having the slightest interest in invading the baltics but if hypothetically that were an issue there's no way we could defend those countries it has nothing to do with our with our will we were just idiots to ever sign them into nato with the the um the collective security requirement of one for all and all for one that is impossible to realize given the logistics now let me ask you this um well for your opponent's side of the story i guess a little bit more i mean certainly um like you i'm used to arguing about all of the things that the americans and the european allies have done to provoke this crisis with the russians uh including you know all of the crisis in ukraine and in syria especially in the nato expansion going back to bill clinton and all of these things but let's say you asked i don't know stephen hadley who worked for george w bush or somebody like him that like hey so what's your problem with russia anyway they would have a litany of accusations against the russians where the russians let them down and failed to be partners or whatever however they would say um do the hawks have a case at all i mean it's not that vladimir putin is an angel just because george bush and barack obama are really really lousy presidents on our side you know well the the russians aren't bunny rabbits and uh anybody who thinks that they're nice and cuddly is making a serious mistake but there's no reason why they should be cuddly they are realists they are defending their own interests we are we are not considering other people's interests and that is the is the key um error and the key fault in our foreign policy that the rest of the world does not exist there are only american interests and that is not sustainable that's not realizable and can get us into serious trouble um now where we are today um there have been many comparisons made what what are we living through what do we look through in the past that has some resemblance to where we are today and yes people speak about the cold war and it's a new cold war um but the there are various phases of the cold war since we're talking about the inf treaty and medium range missiles and we're speaking about they're being placed in europe by the united states potentially it's very nice to consider where we were in the 1980s this a very similar problem came up only it was not the americans but the russians were the first the soviets were the first they put in what we called ss20s that was our nomenclature for their missiles uh aimed at western europe and western the western europe admitted with very grudgingly and with enormous protests that the united states could to counter this threat um we could put in pershing missiles so that sounds a bit like where we are today but i i disagree with the validity of that comparison it's only it's only the missiles themselves having a similar range which makes it sound like this problem is the same it's not putin's answer made it clear that the situation today much more closely resembles 1962 in a cuban missile crisis what we're talking about is the period of time for warning about that the other side is making an attack and attack usually meaning a decapitation attack to knock out the leadership to knock out the principal um structures of the other country and to take over now that time has been an hour or half an hour with icbms with these missiles that the united states is potentially putting into romania and as tomahawks and to um poland the warning time as putin said in his speech comes down to 10 or 12 minutes which is nonsensical it's not that really there's not a warning time there's nothing you can do about it there's no time even to to to ascertain whether it's a false alarm the only logical thing you do would be to push push on warning however the the what the russian response is is uh well i'm not putting missiles into cuba but they would they're putting into the field uh their their mach 5 mach 9 um missiles which would shorten the travel distance to washington and to american heartland to the same tell 10 or 12 minutes that we would be giving moscow with our slower moving missiles based in romania it's a situation very much like 1962 when khrushchev uh revolted against the the secret basing of american missiles against russia in turkey and decided well to complete this game you're you're shortening the distance and the travel time to moscow do the same and i'll put missiles into cuba right but then here's the sad part you know the the uh cold war ended 30 years ago the soviet union ceased to exist you know like 27 years ago or somewhere around there um so all this is completely insane and unnecessary to think that we're even having this conversation at all is well shocking but not surprising i guess again it is or it isn't the the problem the point about russia is they are hard enough to crack and um we had an opportunity to crack that not but we didn't want it the opportunity was in 1994 1995 when uh boris yeltsin agreed to the polish request to join nato and he let the americans have their way on poland in the anticipation that russia would then be the next country to be admitted to nato that we forget about all these things um and when you go back then you see why the russians have been so disappointed that they that nato was was built up not as an integrating force for europe with their inclusion but at their expense and uh as a as a new wall to exclude russia from the security uh agreements governing europe right all right well listen uh thank you very much for your time again on the show gilbert's uh great talk to you again well thanks so much for having me all right you guys that's gilbert doctorow uh you can find this one at antiwar.com putin on national defense threats or a bid to negotiate on arms control and he does include his own translation uh transcript of putin's statements including the off the cuff stuff so uh definitely take a look at that it's at antiwar.com right now all right y'all thanks find me at libertarianinstitute.org at scotthorton.org antiwar.com and reddit.com slash scott horton show oh yeah and read my book fool's errand timed and the war in afghanistan at foolserend.us
