02/10/15 – James Carden – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest is James Carden.
He's at the National Interest, that's nationalinterest.org, and one of the handful who's good on Ukraine issues these days.
It is a pretty small handful of writers who are getting this right, but like James, pretty much all of them are really good on it, the ones who are good at all, so at least we can be thankful for that.
And I think, James, you're saying in this article that things are looking a little bit brighter along those lines, that there's been some pretty positive backlash against the Brookings Report recommending arming the Ukrainians.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm all right.
Thanks for having me back.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
I mean, what a difference a week makes.
In late, you know, the last week in January, we were seeing a very coordinated campaign by the part of a lot of think tanks and op-ed columnists urging the Obama administration to arm Kiev.
And it began around January 27th with a piece by Ivo Dabler, who is the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and it continued on until February 2nd when Brookings, Chicago Council, and the Atlanta Council released this report, a so-called fact-finding report, urging the president to go ahead and send so-called defensive weapons to Kiev.
And the pushback from that was immediate and, to some of us, quite gratifying.
And you saw very, very esteemed Russia hands from all over, from the Kennan Institute, from Brookings, from the Carnegie Endowment, all saying that this is quite a terrible idea.
They were joined by, you know, people who have been saying this all along, like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Cohen.
And so it seems like the tide might be turning, and the president, hopefully, will not follow through on such a foolish, dangerous, reckless policy.
Yeah, well, that certainly is good news.
And, well, first of all, let's rewind one step.
Is it significant that it's the Brookings Institution, the Atlanta Council, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which, I guess, by the sound of them, seem like kind of older, more centrist-type establishments as compared to, you know, the usual suspects, AEI and, you know, whatever, whoever's doing what Crystal wants, you know, in the neoconservative movement?
It wasn't the, you know, Fred Kagan's wife.
Well, Robert Kagan's wife got us into this mess, but Fred Kagan's wife, she's not, you know, from the Institute for the Study of War.
She's not a co-signatory on here.
So is this really, before the pushback you described, is this more a matter of consensus, or it really is more just kind of a neocon weirdo position to take, that they should do this?
No, I think that that's what we're still worrying about, the Chicago Council, Atlanta Council, and Brookings report, because these people are really members of the establishment.
I mean, Strokes Heldit was Deputy Secretary of State under Bill Clinton.
He is a leading candidate to be Secretary of State if Hillary Clinton should become president.
God help us.
And Michelle Fornoy is a leading candidate to be Hillary Clinton's Secretary of Defense.
These people are former ambassadors, former representatives to NATO, former generals and admirals.
So no, what we're still worrying is that these folks are establishment people, and they were basically mimicking the crystal neoconservative talking points.
So I think some of us are breathing a sigh of relief that other establishment hands got in on the debate and pushed back against this idea.
That's funny.
You know, I first heard of Strobe Talbot years ago because he'd written a thing in Time magazine called The Birth of the Global Nation in 1992, the summer of 92, saying, well, very soon we'll have a one-world government where the U.S. and Russia and the European Union and everybody obeys a single authority under a one-world federal army.
Boy, I guess if we're going to ask him to predict the future of whatever policies, maybe we ought to think twice about his insight as it's been proven out so far.
Well, Talbot is a very curious case.
Throughout the 80s when he was writing for Time, he was someone who was seen as a dove.
He was very critical of Reagan's sort of hard-line Cold War policy.
And then when he got into the government during the 90s in the Clinton administration, he underwent this incredible transformation to the uber hawk that he is today.
And it's quite puzzling that he seems to view Mr. Putin's Russia as a greater danger than the old Soviet Union.
Right.
And one thing here real quick, just on the politics still, before we actually get to what's important here is the war and the crisis itself.
But Michelle Flournoy, it's brought up in the chat room how she didn't want to be nominated by Obama to be secretary of defense because, as she put it, she wanted to wait for Hillary Clinton.
And that's just it's kind of frustrating to me to see where this woman, I guess it just doesn't count.
Does it count in Washington, D.C.?
Does anyone mention how she lost the Afghan war?
She's the lady who was the leading champion of the counterinsurgency doctrine, which supposedly worked in Iraq and so needed to be replicated in Afghanistan by tripling the war there and extending its length.
And it didn't work.
She was in Feith's job, the undersecretary of defense for policy.
And I mean, all indications are she was in charge of policy to a great degree.
And what was going on over there?
And is it not even a mark against her that this lady lost a war?
Or does Afghanistan not count as a loss yet or what?
Well, I once wrote an article in The Nation where I said that living in Obama's Washington is like living in a town almost wholly inhabited by amnesiacs.
So, no, it's not going to count against her.
And, you know, none of these folks who were in power and whose advice led to such disasters under President George W. Bush have paid any sort of professional price at all.
You know, it's really true what Stephen Waltz said, that being a neocon means never having to say you're sorry.
Yeah.
And I mean, I'm far from expecting real accountability or anything, but it seems like there would be the slightest bit of shame and embarrassment and recall.
But now I guess I'm being silly.
I'm sorry.
I don't mean to waste your interview on silly topics like accountability.
It's nice to dream.
Yeah, it is sometimes.
All right.
Well, now, so we're almost up near the break here.
But I guess.
Well, let me ask you this.
When it comes to failing, it seems like the underlying narrative in the report and in all the op eds around it is that, hey, we're going to push the Russians.
Obviously, we can't beat him and we can't help the Ukrainians beat him.
But we can make the war cost a lot to the Russians.
And but they don't it's like they don't finish the sentence and make them matter is the rest of the sentence.
But but they just sort of seem it.
I mean, but it can't be right that they just don't think of the end of the sentence of what they expect to happen as a result of this army.
But they just sort of leave the argument at that.
Let's just arm them.
And we'll worry about what happens to Baghdad later.
He kind of attitude, you know, right.
It's almost as though they think it's a consequence free policy.
I happen to think that, you know, the way that at least that Brookings report outlined it, it happens also to be a deeply immoral policy because what they want to do is send.
And they basically said this in the report is to send more people back to Moscow and body bags.
So the war will become unpopular and Putin will be forced to to to turn around.
But of course, that's not going to happen.
Hey, they're being pretty honest to put it that way.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I got to stop you.
But we got to go out to this break, James.
But we'll be right back, everybody.
It's James Carden from the National Interest.
The article is here's why arming Ukraine would be a disaster.
Very important piece.
Go find it there.
National interest dot org.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Talking with James Carden from National Interest dot org.
The National Interest also he writes for the American Conservative Magazine.
And we're talking about the crisis in Ukraine, the politics about it in D.C.
And I guess we need to get into the global ones a bit here, too.
But I'm sorry.
At the break here, James, when I had to interrupt you, you were talking about the stated purpose, according to the Brookings Institute thing.
They're coming right out and saying what we want is more dead Russians because we hope that'll change the political conversation in Moscow.
Yes.
So that's just one piece that makes the report just one of the many pieces that is utterly unrealistic about the report.
It is this theory that we can send in these so-called defensive weapons and, you know, make the cost unbearable to Mr. Putin strikes me as very, very unrealistic and very, very dangerous idea.
And now, so back to the good news again about how a lot of people are saying, hey, come on now.
This is just, you know, even on NPR, they ask, well, what if he calls our bluff?
They said, I don't know.
Ivo Daudler, who you mentioned, the lead author of the thing, said, well, geez, I guess if they call our bluff and escalate further, then, well, we'll escalate further and that'll lead to even more dead Russians and then that'll lead the debate to change in Moscow, maybe.
And that was all I could say.
It was the same thing again.
Well, the other piece that goes unmentioned is that, let's say, right, let's say that we send in these weapons and the Russians escalate and then we escalate.
So that's sort of a, they'll sort of cancel each other out.
But that means that there are more armaments in the war zone, which will mean that there will be more civilian casualties.
And the authors of the report and the people who are chairing this policy on never really mentioned the fact that, you know, already there are 5,400 casualties.
And that number will certainly take a lot higher if we pursue arming Kiev.
They don't seem to mention that.
And it doesn't seem to register because you need to think about who the people are who are dying.
They're Eastern Ukrainians, meaning that they're pro-Russian, they're Russian-speaking.
And so they don't really count in their worldview.
Right?
These people are solely concerned with their clients in Kiev and in the West of the country, and they don't really seem to register.
These people are treated as sort of, what would you say, collateral damage.
And they seem perfectly fine with that.
And I think that's a huge problem.
And now, so here's the thing, too.
I was reading Stephen Walt over there at Foreign Policy, and he was talking about these different models of intervention and when to deter and when to appease and this kind of thing.
And he was saying that because we're kind of in this on the false premise that Russian aggression, Russian aggression, so we must deter it, we're mistaking that what Russia is doing is a reaction because of how insecure they feel.
And so when we escalate our deterrence based on the false narrative of what's really going on here, we actually make them, it's sort of an equation that guarantees further escalation on their part, when what we should be doing is the obvious thing is saying, hey, trying to demand that you have to have either a trade deal with us or a trade deal with them, and using a bunch of Nazis to overthrow the government and all that, that's a little bit out of line.
Let's go with Austria during the Cold War, you know, Finland sort of neutrality model, and you can have trade with whoever you want and kind of back off.
That's the obvious thing to do if you understand what really happened here.
But if everybody's agreed upon the lie that this whole crisis started when Putin invaded Crimea in the spring of last year, for crying out loud, which seems to be what everybody in the media thinks, and all the people, all the so-called experts they interview, then it seems like even if they mean well, they still, they really think, as Newsweek puts it, oh my God, it's a new domino theory, that's their new article at Newsweek, is that if we don't deter Putin now, the Baltics are next.
Yes, that's one of the sillier arguments I've heard.
People who are supporting this new domino theory also seem to have a very short memory.
The domino theory is what got us into quite a great deal of trouble in Vietnam, and then the democratic domino theory, which was used to justify the Iraq war and subsequent interventions in the Middle East, have also not ended so well.
So the fact that these folks are actually calling it a domino theory raises some very serious questions about what they know and what they do not know about recent American history.
With regard to, you know, dating the conflict to March, that's another kind of sleight-of-hand trick that these people do.
The conflict didn't begin in March with Putin's annexation of Crimea and then subsequent invasion later on in April.
It began in February.
It could be said, actually, that it began in November when Yanukovych was being pressured by the European Union to sign the EU Association Agreement.
So that's exactly right.
When you begin with a lousy premise, you're not going to come up with a proper solution to the problem.
Well, we have a kind of weird incentive problem here, right, where people don't want to admit they're wrong, but, boy, for them to continue wanting to base a policy on the false premise, we can see just how wrong they get it, right?
They've been corrected now by Henry Kissinger, and then as you're reporting here, now for a second time Kissinger, at least by proxy, his organization has put out another thing on this.
They've been corrected by John Mearsheimer in Foreign Affairs and some other prominent places about, hey, hey, hey, everybody, hold your horses, what's going on here?
But they still seem to be proceeding ahead based on, as you put it in here, the McCain view of the world and what's going on here, and never mind his role in Ukraine leading up to the coup of last February.
That's right.
He and Chris Murphy went over to address the protest on the Maidan in, I believe it was in December.
You know, that's sort of an extraordinary thing.
You know, we had Victoria Nuland handing out cookies to the protesters.
Now imagine if a Russian official went up to occupy Wall Street and handed out cookies.
What would our reaction be to something like that, getting involved in our domestic politics?
I don't know why we think we have the right or the wisdom to interfere in countries' internal affairs, countries that are 4,000 or 5,000 miles from our shores.
It doesn't make any sense.
And then when we do get involved, the result is nothing less than disastrous.
Yeah.
And now, well, so is there a way to kind of make it okay for them to admit that, all right, well, we've gone off a little half-cocked here and let's scale it back?
I mean, it seems like Obama's a bit reluctant to continue to push forward.
And obviously McCain's not going to be quiet.
But do you think when the Kennan group and Kissinger associates and these guys start pushing back, is that going to have some kind of effect, you think?
I hope so.
I hope it has had some effect on the president's decision-making.
I think the most influential person in terms of influencing Obama is Angela Merkel.
And she stated at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend that arming Ukraine is not a good idea, that there's no military solution to the crisis, and that it can only be solved at the negotiating table.
And she's exactly right.
And she is one of the few people outside of his inner circle, his very, very small insular inner circle, that actually can get through to him.
So I think as long as she stands firm, you know, we won't follow the recommendations of this daft report.
Yeah.
I guess if you're the leader of Germany, it's a little harder to see these kinds of things in these sort of abstract think tank sort of terms.
It's more they have a little bit better historical memory of what a crisis like this could amount to if it really came down to it over there.
Well, not only that, it's right in their neighborhood.
I mean, you know, think about that.
I mean, that influences your way of thinking, too.
And that's something that people here, especially the neoconservatives, don't particularly understand.
What if Russia was trying to set up naval bases in Canada?
What would our reaction be?
What was our reaction during the Cuban Missile Crisis?
The fact that Ukraine is on their border, Kiev is 400 miles from Moscow.
You know, that seems to make no impression on these bloodthirsty neoconservatives.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I sure appreciate the fact that you keep writing about this.
It's very important.
And I'm not sure how much traffic nationalinterest.org gets, but I bet it's pretty important traffic when it comes down to that.
And what you're doing, I think, is really making a difference in the narrative here.
So please continue.
Well, I appreciate that.
Thanks for having me on again.
All right, y'all.
That's James Carden.
He is at nationalinterest.org and also at The American Conservative magazine.
That's theamericanconservative.com.
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