All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am 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 I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Jack Matlock.
He was the second to last ambassador to the USSR back in 1991, and was there right up until the very, very end, or very, very close to it.
Welcome back to the show, Jack.
How are you, sir?
Well, I'm great, especially since I've so far escaped the COVID.
Oh, well, that's very good to hear.
Glad to know that you're doing well, sir.
And so, listen, I saw where Sam Husseini's group, the Institute for Public Accuracy, had put out a note that you were making comments about Joe Biden and his Russia policy and what you would like to see, and I would like to hear what you would like to see out of Joe Biden's Russia policy, sir.
So please, the floor is yours.
Well, I think that we need to make a greater effort to cooperate with Russia and those areas where we have a mutual interest, and we do have a mutual interest in many of them.
And I think that President Biden, by renewing the New START Treaty, started off making the right step.
But then to get into sort of personal denigration of the Russian president, I think that doesn't help us find a way to cooperate.
And the fact is, in the most important issues that we face, right now, the pandemic, also global warming, terrorism, all of these big issues, Russia and we have exactly the same interests, and we should be cooperating.
And I know we have differences, but these differences are not the deep differences that caused the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
That is over.
And we need to take a close look at what our interests are.
The question is not what you can do to please or displease Russia.
The question is what we need to do for our own interests.
Now, we've got issues like nuclear weapons.
And you know, we just saw an editorial or an article in the Wall Street Journal from former Defense Secretary Perry, and also from Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn, pointing out how we need to give more attention to the whole nuclear issue, one that the late Secretary of State George Shultz did contention to.
But that's not the only issue.
Now, the second thing is, I think that overall, whether it is Russia or China or some of these other things, we have to recognize that these big issues, transnational issues that face us are going to require cooperation with other big countries.
Furthermore, we have been actually not only wasting tremendous amounts of effort in trying to control other countries, these endless wars are draining us, are draining us of what we need to use here at home.
So we need to stop the endless wars.
And we need to find a way to do it.
So simply arguing with Russia over whether Crimea should be part of Russia or part of Ukraine, these may be real issues, but they are not nearly as important as the need to find a way that we can cooperate on the things that are most important to us.
If we don't end this excessive spending, I believe, on defense hardware, on placing troops everywhere in the world, getting involved in other people's fights.
If we don't stop that, we're not going to be able to afford to repair things at home, which are now so desperately needed.
All right.
Now, I want to give you a chance, if you could, sir, to elaborate on the part about when you said that our differences with Russia now don't compare, or at least are so vastly different than our differences with the Soviet Union of old.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that.
I guess in your mind, how poor of a substitute for the USSR modern Russia is as an enemy of the United States.
I think modern Russia is not an enemy of the United States.
And to picture them as one is simply a mistake.
Now, the Soviet Union, the Cold War with the Soviet Union was about communism and the habit of imposing communism on countries that didn't want it.
That stopped.
We came to an agreement because it wasn't even in the Soviet Union's interest to do this.
They made enemies rather than friends.
Something we need to remember when we think that dominating somebody else is going to give us more power.
Actually, it weakens a country to try to govern people that don't want to be governed by them.
Anyway, the thing is, we often say, oh, we won the Cold War.
That is a misunderstanding.
Beginning with President Reagan and then the first President Bush, we negotiated an end to the Cold War when Gorbachev changed the Soviet Union from a communist power seeking to dominate others to one which withdrew its domination from other countries and started to reform, rejecting the Marxist-Leninist theory that was the basis of communism.
And you know how the end of the Soviet Union was not a victory for the West?
The Cold War had ended two years before that happened.
And actually, at the time, we didn't want the Soviet Union to collapse.
President Bush was trying to encourage them to have a voluntary federation.
So the whole idea that we won and can do what we wish, I think, was mistaken.
The idea that, as Francis Fukuyama wrote, it was the end of history and that the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union showed that a liberal democracy was the future of the whole world.
You know, that reminds me of the idea that socialism, as they called it, was going to be the future of the whole world and that they had to defend it.
That was the whole basis of the Cold War.
Now, there's no evidence whatsoever that one particular system is going to fit everybody.
And even if that were true, there is no way that an outsider, say the United States, can create democracy in another country.
You know, think about it.
If democracy is the government by the people, of the people, for the people, how can any outsider create it?
The answer is you can't.
And you start trying to interfere in other people's fights, to interfere by supporting one side or the other in foreign elections.
And by the way, we have done that routinely for years.
Now, we accuse the Russians of doing it in the U.S., but I don't find much evidence that anything they've done has had any influence on our elections.
But certainly we have backed other candidates so that I think we have to understand that we are not served by an effort to give a report cards to other countries about whether their rule is good or not.
Of course, as humanitarians, we would like everybody to be governed well.
But, you know, from the beginning of our independence, our founding fathers warned us against permanent alliances with others or against trying to get involved in other people's fights, even if there are struggles for liberation.
And John Quincy Adams gave a famous speech nearly 200 years ago when he said America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
And that she is the the partisan and supporter of freedom everywhere, but a guarantor only of her own.
And we need to go back to that philosophy.
So I think that's lying behind.
Now, if I have time to say something more, I will say in ending the Cold War, we followed certain rules.
One thing we kept in close touch.
Second, though we were at the height of the Cold War, President Reagan never personally insulted a Soviet leader in public.
Of course, he criticized communism as a system.
But when he met the Soviet leaders, his first words were always, we hold the future of the world in our hands.
We must we must support peace.
And, you know, instead of constant, he also said before he first met Gorbachev, we're much too upfront about human rights when we yell at them in public.
We don't help those who are our victims.
We can actually hurt them.
We have to deal with human rights quietly and by diplomacy.
And we did.
And, you know, we brought about by cooperation that.
And just before he met Gorbachev for the first time, he also wrote at the end of a memo, whatever we achieve, we must not call it victory.
Because that would simply make the next achievement impossible.
Now, you know, since the end of the Cold War, our policy has been absolutely the opposite of all of those, trying to give them report cards on such things as human rights when we don't allow other people to give report cards on ours.
And we withdrew during the second Bush administration from the basic arms control treaties.
We started expanding NATO eastward into Eastern Europe, even though President Bush had assured Gorbachev, assured and not guaranteed legally, but assured him that if the Soviet Union allowed Germany, united Germany to stay in NATO and NATO would not expand to the east.
Well, the Clinton administration simply never acknowledged that, began expanding.
And when we got to the point of considering countries like Ukraine and Georgia, which for centuries had been part of either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, obviously we were crossing a red line.
So I think that when we talk about the problems with Russia, we have to understand that from a Russian standpoint, they have been reacting to a very aggressive and sometimes hypocritical American approach.
After all, we invaded Iraq when Iraq had not attacked us, when we had no authority from the UN to do so, when even our French and German allies told us not to.
And we have created a much worse situation there than happened before, in addition to losing nearly 5 million American lives and hundreds of thousands, 5,000 American lives, and hundreds of thousands of other deaths out of the repercussions of that.
There was a vast mistake, and one which has created conditions that affect Russia much more than they do us.
And when we talk about differences in Syria or so on, we have to understand that the problem there are terrorists that are much more dangerous to Russia than they are to us.
And yet we act as if they have no interest there at all in a country that's almost next door to them.
So I think we really have to begin to understand that rightly or wrongly, why the Russians may perceive that it's our actions that have been aggressive and that in their eyes what they have been doing is reacting to them.
But I think that is a tragedy for both countries, because neither of us are meeting what are the needs of the present and the future to preserve the security and create more prosperity in their countries.
And I think we have got to put the important things first to begin to set some priorities, because if we don't, we are going to continue to waste resources, create problems with our getting involved in other people's fights and waste resources that we need here at home.
And it's not a question of, you know, it's not a question of ignoring the rest of the world, but it is a question to let us recognize the limitations on our power and also the fact that so much of our recent foreign policy by presidents of both parties have not served our interests.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right.
Now, I want to ask you so many things here to to go back over.
But, you know, there's this famous phrase that only Nixon could go to China since he was such an anti-communist talk.
And then you could say the same thing about Ronald Reagan going to Reykjavik, although unfortunately that one didn't work out all the way.
But the cliche still holds.
Right.
But that means that and certainly this doesn't count when a Republican president is framed for high treason with the Kremlin.
Donald Trump certainly could not do any such thing.
But now we have a Democrat, Joe Biden, who, you know, is on the opposite side of that formula, that he has to always prove how tough he is to prove that he's not weak on any and all of America's enemies all the time, even more pressure on him than on a Republican hawk.
And so and this is something that obviously is a huge part of the of what he has to deal with here is the domestic Russia hawks, of which there are so many.
And in both parties and in all the think tanks and in the media and, of course, all the arms manufacturers, especially with all the hype about Russiagate and their alleged intervention in the 2016 election, it just makes it so difficult for anyone to say, well, all those politics be damned.
I'm going to do the right thing and I'm going to sit down and I'm going to resign that INF treaty and hell, I'll go ahead and get back in the anti-ballistic missile treaty that George W.
Bush abrogated back in 2002.
Why not?
Who could do that in American politics now?
Well, you know, I do think that right now both parties, or at least the people in both parties, are much more concerned with our internal problems.
We desperately need to begin to deal with these more effectively.
And, you know, I'm just hoping that, and actually when we speak of the Russophobia, yes, if you trace President Biden's past, he has been, quite frankly, one of the leaders that has pushed that.
But I think also he is a reasonable man.
And I would hope that he, and even with the background of some of the people he has appointed, not all of them, by the way, that they will, you know, take a deep breath, begin to think about what they're going to need for the large infrastructure renewal that he seems to have in mind, and that they're really going to have to pull back from these, I think, largely artificial creation of enemies abroad.
We need really to be more, look for ways we can cooperate with China and Russia to our mutual interest and try to downplay things of lesser importance.
Doesn't mean there won't be problems.
Of course there will be.
That's why you should, you know, you have diplomats and that's why you should be thinking of ways that you downplay the differences and then cooperate more intensively where your interests coincide.
And what my hope is that, sort of despite the past, but I think both parties, the leaders have made a mistake in looking at the end of the Cold War as if it was an American victory, as if we were the only power in the world that counted anymore, and that we were so powerful we could do anything, including, you know, changing other governments and so on.
And I think those conclusions were simply wrong.
I think it is time, without ignoring the rest of the world, without cooperating where we need to, to turn, you know, to our problems at home and try to solve the divides we have.
And if we keep making enemies, and I think we have in effect made enemies, both of Russia and China artificially, doesn't mean we don't have differences.
It certainly doesn't mean that their government is different from ours.
But let's recognize that we don't know what it's going to take to govern China or Russia, and that only the Russians and the Chinese are going to deal with that.
And for us to think that the ideas we have are ones that we should try to impose by sanctions and and threats and so on, I think it just wastes our energy, wastes our means, and makes it less possible to solve our problems here at home.
I hope that the Biden administration, as they think through their options, will begin to put these priorities higher than, in effect, continuing fights that are much less important than the big issues for us.
All right.
Now, so is there anything for you to concede to the other side of the argument here that Russia is this aggressive power that Vladimir Putin would seek to recreate at least the Tsar's old empire in Eastern Europe, if not the Soviet Union, if we weren't there to defend from his aggression and all of these things, sir?
I think that's absolutely wrong.
In fact, he has said, President Putin has said that anybody who regrets the collapse of the Soviet, who does not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart.
Anyone who would try to reconstitute it has no brain.
He knows very well the issues we have are very, very local.
And it's not a matter of recreating the Soviet Union.
It is a matter of recognizing that every country is going to demand a certain sphere of influence in the sense they're not going to let an enemy take a military alliance with a neighboring country.
I mean, look at our reaction when the Soviets put missiles on Cuba.
Or think back to the First World War.
One of the reasons Wilson went to war against Germany, because Germany had a plan to try to make an alliance with Mexico.
We don't allow other powers to have any foothold in our whole hemisphere.
And yet we started to encouraging the idea that the newly independent republics, which had in effect been freed by an elected Russian leader, something we need and they need to remember, we didn't bring down the Soviet Union.
It came apart and it came apart under the leadership of the elected leader of Russia.
So, but to involve ourselves in areas that are very sensitive and where things are very complex.
Ukraine was divided in its politics from the very beginning.
And to get involved in, you know, other people's fights when leave the impression to Russia that you're trying to make a military ally of Ukraine, where they have one of their most important naval bases.
I mean, this is just, I mean, it defies common sense.
So, and to say, oh, they're aggressive.
I mean, who's been aggressive?
The United States, particularly in its invasion of Iraq and its invasion of Libya.
You know, we have to look back at these things.
After all, Calafi had made a deal to close his nuclear weapons program.
And then what happens?
He closes it and then we attack and remove him.
And now we want the North Koreans to give up their weapons.
I mean, the guy is not an idiot.
If he gives up his weapons, if history is any guide, we're going to clobber him.
So, you know, I'm picking up a number of these things.
But the fact is that it takes an incredibly one-sided view to say that Russia is the aggressor.
And I mean, and look at it from their standpoint.
Our aggression has occurred in areas right next to them.
And they would say, by trying to support governments that are anti-Russian, they are, we are trying to pick off even parts that historically have been parts of their country and turn them into enemies.
Of course they're going to react to that.
So I think that's another thing.
And is it going to be successful?
No, it is not successful.
These various sanctions that we have put on, they are not achieving any purpose whatsoever, except making relations more difficult.
So, you know, after all, we were supposed to be the ones in favor of capitalism and free trade and all of these things.
And now it turns out that we use our strength, economic strength, to try to bring political dividends.
And that rarely ever works.
You know, I could go on and on about these things.
But I think we have to understand that it is very, very hard for, I would say, most Russians to understand why we consider them enemies or why we consider them aggressive, when in fact they have not, in fact, you know, tried to reconstitute the Soviet Union.
They cannot.
They do want to have at least enough influence in the areas, other than the three Baltic states.
They've given up on them.
They do want to have enough influence in these areas that they're not used against them.
And that's, I would say, a perfectly normal human reaction.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your time.
I only regret that it's so rare that we talk.
Jack, this has been great.
And I hope we can do it again soon.
Thanks for the question.
Glad to be on.
Really appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that is Jack Matlock.
He was the second-to-last ambassador to the Soviet Union.
Was ambassador there from 87 to 91.
