03/11/16 – James Carden – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, here on Liberty Radio Network.
New to two on the weekdays.
It's libertarian foreign policy mostly.
All right, so our first guest on the show today is James W. Carden.
He is contributing writer for The Nation and also writes regularly at The National Interest.
He's the editor of the American Committee for East-West Accords website, eastwestaccord.com.
He previously served as an advisor on Russia to the Special Representative for Global Intergovernmental Affairs at the State Department, and he has this very important piece at consortiumnews.com called Sleepwalking Towards Catastrophe.
Welcome back to the show, James.
How are you, sir?
I'm fine.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
So first of all, before we get into the subject matter, I mean, it's all related, of course.
I was hoping you could discuss a little bit.
Tell us about what I thought was pretty big news, that you guys were able to bring on Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator and former Secretary of Defense under Barack Obama, onto your committee for East-West Accord, which is, you know, in a word, anti-New Cold War group, pro-peace with Russia group that you guys have set up here.
So please tell us all about how that happened and how important you think that is, et cetera like that.
Well, I'm not necessarily, you know, privy to those sorts of things.
It's kind of above my pay grade.
I just added the website, but we're very, very pleased, not only that Chuck Hagel has been gracious enough to join us, we've also added a number of other very distinguished Americans in the past couple of months.
So the board is now at 11 members, and it includes Donald F. McHenry, who was the U.N.
Ambassador under Jimmy Carter.
He's joined us.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's granddaughter, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, has joined us, and she's the chairman of the Roosevelt Institute up in New York.
And so, you know, we're growing, and maybe not, you know, growing as quickly as I would like on the web, eastwestaccord.com, but, you know, I think that 2016 is shaping up for the committee.
So thanks for mentioning it.
Yeah, sure.
Well, and, you know, Chuck Hagel is a real big get if you can, if you guys can get him to get out there and make some statements, give some speeches, and try to raise a little bit of hell.
Of course, Jack Matlock, the second-to-last ambassador to the Soviet Union is there.
We've spoken with him on the show a couple times.
And Bill Bradley, former presidential candidate, former senator from the Democratic Party.
It sort of seems like any of the, and this is the thing with Bradley, I don't know a lot about Bradley, but it seems like basically any of these guys who really know anything about Russia, and they don't have a real vested interest in climbing on board the bandwagon for the new Cold War, they object.
It's sort of like even Bob Barr is good on Iran.
I mean, Bob Barr, what reason does he have to be good on anything?
But it's because his father worked in Iran when he was a kid, so he knows a little bit about it.
So he knows BS when he hears it.
You know what I mean?
Well, that's right.
I mean, you know, Senator Bradley was very involved in the post-Cold War, you know, deliberations on how we should approach Russia and was a very positive voice back then.
What you're saying about Bob Barr, you know, almost applies to Representative Dana Roebucker, who is, unlike Barr, is still a sitting congressman, but he's been particularly good on Russian issues because he's been there.
I mean, and that's probably one of the first, you know, well, that's a very rare thing, I think, for a member of Congress to actually have any first-hand experience dealing with the place.
And I think that once you have even a little bit of exposure, it sort of, you know, the tendency to paint, you know, to paint Russia in these very stark, malign terms sort of dissipates.
Well, you know, I think one of the most powerful techniques, I'm sure Donald Trump would say, one of the most powerful techniques toward pushing or, you know, for pushing your point of view is you just bake your premise right into the question and make it seem as though it's, you know, unanimously held belief or fact, such as last night in the debate, the question for Donald Trump about his praise for Vladimir Putin.
Jake Tapper, who is not just an anchor, but is actually, you know, a journalist, the way he framed the question was, you know, you praise this autocrat.
I think he may have even called him a dictator as though he was not the elected president of Russia.
But then again, there are a lot of elective dictatorships.
I think I kind of live under one right now.
So, you know, I wonder if you really take that on as honestly as you can about just how powerful is Vladimir Putin, how unfair or fair is that characterization after all?
Well, I mean, Tapper is I think Tapper has been particularly bad on this on this topic.
I'm not sure how much he knows about foreign policy.
He, you know, his show has been, you know, has hosted one raging neocon Russophobe after another.
And so I don't I'm not at all surprised that the Tapper posed the question to Trump the way that the way that he did.
You know, Trump has Trump is really, really worried.
The has worried the neocons with his with his comments about Russia.
I mean, we saw was it late last week, early last week, over 100 neocons signed this open letter that was organized by Professor Elliot Cohen, who worked on the George W. Bush State Department, you know, condemning condemning Trump's, you know, foreign policy or supposed, you know, lack of foreign policy chops.
What was hilarious about the letter is that almost every one of the signatories, you know, had had some hand in the disasters of the George W. Bush administration.
And they actually mentioned it in the body of the letter, Trump's comments about the authoritarian Vladimir Putin.
And so comments like, like Trump's, like he was at a rally, a big rally in Huntsville, Alabama, not too long ago, and he said, and this is direct quote, what's wrong with having Russia work with us instead of always fighting, fighting?
What's wrong with having Russia drop bombs all the hell over ISIS?
What's wrong with that?
And well, I don't see very much wrong with that.
But if you're a, you know, if you're a neocon or, you know, anti Putin campaigner who has been, you know, trying desperately to maneuver the United States into a cold war for the past 15 years, you're going to find that that sentiment to be pretty disturbing.
And they have found it to be very disturbing.
And I think that that is why, you know, they dress up the opposition to Trump as though they are, you know, they're opposed to his racist comments about Mexicans and and Muslims.
I would find that believable if they weren't the people pushing, say, the career of Sarah Palin, for instance, who's indulged in all sorts of language like that.
But not a peep of, not a peep of protests when she does it.
So I find that hard to believe that their opposition is based on Trump's supposed, you know, racist or xenophobic tendencies.
He may have some, I don't know.
But I think it has a lot to do with his position on on on Russia and his position on the Middle East.
All right.
But now, so their thing is, and you know, this is if you're against war for the KLA, then you love Milosevic.
And if you're against war for the Battle Brigade, then you love Saddam Hussein.
And and, you know, that's the way the accusation always goes.
So the way they put it is, you know, if you don't want to pick a fight with Russia, then you're pro Putin.
And Trump actually, as Tapper said last night, it was a compliment.
You said he's a strong leader.
And and so, of course, Trump didn't really answer.
But that's not my point.
My question is, and you said, OK, you disagree with Tapper and he's bad on this.
But how inaccurate is Tapper on this?
Because after all, well, the music's playing and now you don't have time to answer me.
On the other side of this break, then that's that's what I want to know is, is just how powerful is Putin?
Is he really a dictator?
How many more terms do you expect him to put in?
And and and what is the truth of our hawks point of view about his intentions?
That's what I want to ask when we get back with James Carden right after this show.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott.
It's my show.
I'm talking with James Carden.
Writer for the nation and the national interest.
And the American Committee for East West Accord.
That's at East West Accord dot com.
And then sorry.
So, yeah, you know how it is with the heartbreaks and everything.
But, James, we were discussing just how much of a dictator is Putin after all.
Well, I think I'll preface this by and this will sound initially like a dodge, but I will get to your question.
It's not a question or topic that I actually spend a lot of time thinking about, because the way I approach sort of foreign policy questions is that I don't really believe that the internal dynamics of other countries actually tell you all that much about kind of their external posture.
So in terms of Vladimir Putin, see, I get called a Kremlin Putin apologist rather more often than I would like.
And to me, it doesn't really matter if Mr. Putin is going to remain president of Russia for the next five minutes or for the next 50 years.
I think that the problems that sort of bedevil U.S.-Russian relations, they predate him.
And if they aren't addressed now, they'll remain.
And that's the problem of that's the problem of the kind of security system within Europe.
It's the problem of Russia's place in Europe.
It's the problem of NATO and how we get to a sort of modus vivendi between NATO and Russia so we don't have these terrible things breaking out like the conflict in Ukraine.
I think people put people like Tapper probably put way too much emphasis on the man and not enough on sort of the shape of the geopolitical system.
Now, how much of a dictator is Putin?
Well, look, I think it's pretty pretty accepted that, you know, when in the last election in 2012, he padded, you know, padded his his total by about 10 percentage points to 65 percent.
He would have won quite handily with 55 percent.
You know, now he has a rating of approval rating of about 80 percent.
But those those numbers are reliable because they're taken by something called the Levada Center, which is very well respected in the West.
So this isn't some kind of, you know, tin pot dictatorship where when you hear, you know, some dictator has 90 percent approval rating, it must be and usually is false.
Those are actually pretty good numbers.
And and so, you know, he he does have legitimacy.
And I think the other thing that you need to keep in mind here is that he is surrounded by high level politics himself.
There are competing interest groups within the Kremlin.
This is not a situation where, you know, in in sort of popular history, we have the idea of Stalin and what Stalin said went and was the law.
And that was it.
My understanding is that that is not the case today.
He has he has various blocks that he needs to manage.
And that isn't so very different from from what happens in Washington.
They refer to their system as, quote, unquote, sort of a managed democracy.
I think that's probably a fair, you know, like ours.
Yeah, well, actually, I was just going to say that, you know, during the you know, this is a good time to think about the state of our own democracy, because yeah, they're a republic like Iran or America.
Well, I mean, you know, do they have such things as superdelegates and an electoral college?
I mean, you know, we don't we don't necessarily have this, you know, this wonderful direct democracy that we like to pretend that we have.
I mean, you know, my view of it is that as someone who is who, you know, I rather like Bernie.
But, you know, I think Hillary is stealing this thing with these superdelegates.
I mean, they're not beholden to anyone.
It's just a bunch of, you know, you know, apparatchiks in the Democratic Party who she has under her under her wing.
So, I mean, you know, we need to allow for differences in other countries, political systems.
I guess that's that's what I've been in a very long winded way trying to trying to get to.
I hope that kind of answers your question.
Sure, that's fair.
And I don't want to sound like I think that, you know, their accusations are the most important questions necessarily.
But if we go back, the reason that I asked was it was in response to something that you said along the lines of, you know, their kind of baseless narratives about what's going on here.
And the dictatorship of Putin in their narrative is, you know, part and parcel, of course, with the narrative of his aggression in Eastern Europe and his threat that he's going to invade the Balkans anytime now.
And remember that time when history began in April of 2014 and he invaded Crimea?
Lord knows how many people were killed, but it may have been millions.
I don't know.
And this is their narrative is that madman Putin is on the loose.
And even though he's bombing the Islamic State, we can't allow that.
We got to bomb it better and crowd him out because Russian influence in the Middle East.
He's trying to take the whole thing over because Obama's weakness.
Right.
This is the narrative that we're getting to.
And basically, your point in this article here is, yeah, no, that's just not right.
Well, no, it's not right.
And it's I think one of the other things I try to point to in the in the article is that I think that there's an insufficient, insufficient understanding among the candidates that the world order as it currently obtains is is exceedingly dangerous.
And there seems to be very, very, so let's go back to Tap, who, you know, who asked a question about Mr. Putin and basically, you know, Mr. Putin's personality and, you know, that implying that, you know, Trump is soft on Vladimir Putin because Putin complimented him, whatever.
I mean, that is so beside the point.
I mean, we what we need to ask these these candidates is that, you know, don't you think that with the United States military and the Russian military circling one another in the skies above Syria and the waters of the Black Sea and in Ukraine and with NATO's plans to station troops on the Russian frontier, don't you think that this is sort of dangerous and aren't there risks that we should be that we should be talking about and soberly considering, considering that that that, you know, between the two of us, I think we there are 16000 nuclear warheads.
But it never comes up.
Instead, we get we get these exceedingly stupid questions from Jay Tapper about, you know, why do you like Mr. Putin?
So that was sort of the other the other reason I wrote the piece.
Right.
Well, and of course, you know, the the sleepwalking towards war, of course, is a reference to World War One and and the the emphasis that, you know, the unimaginable is possible.
You know, I mean, as you just mentioned with the nukes.
See, this is the problem with the nukes is you automatically sound like some kind of an alarmist.
I mean, for crying out loud, we didn't have a nuclear war in the 50s when we didn't have a nuclear war in the 80s.
We're going to have a nuclear war now.
But you know what?
Things unpredicted have happened, I think, as you say in the piece, nation states, the people who run them always perceive defensive moves as preparations for aggression.
It's just their frame of reference always.
And you mentioned the the millions and millions butchered in World War One, which grew into World War Two a generation later, etc.
These things have happened in the past, you know, and even with the nukes in the hands of the Americans before.
So that's the thing about it when when the whole narrative is Putin on the march and we must protect humanity from him when really the reality is it's NATO, our military alliance that's on the march and right up to his borders and overthrowing friendly governments on his borders and this kind of thing, you know, threatening his last naval base, ice free naval base, this kind of thing.
But they they just won't portray it.
They won't tell the story straight.
So the you know, the the demand from the people to to knock it off is silent because the people don't even know there's anything to complain about.
You know, if anything, they're kind of worried about what's Putin going to do next.
I heard he's really getting out of control these days.
Yeah.
I mean, one of the things that one of I don't know if you're familiar if you've had him on the show, but Peter Hitchens is a terrific conservative writer over in the UK.
I'm familiar with him.
I haven't talked to him yet.
Well, he makes the point and he has he has long experience in Moscow.
He was a correspondent there and he makes the point that the Soviet Union, when it dissolved, gave up voluntarily gave up over 700000 square miles of of of of territory that they that they controlled.
In the in the in the intervening years, the European Union has gained control over 400000 square miles inching up towards Russia's border.
So this idea that that that that it's Russia, that is the encroaching power on the continent, just it just doesn't hold up and forget the EU.
You know, any EU basically is stepping stone is the first step to NATO, to NATO membership.
So the idea that the Russians would just would not be alarmed by the the encroachment of the EU and NATO to their borders is simply silly.
I mean, that's a remarkably foolish way to to to to look at the world, that that that they're just going to take our word for it, that Russia is simply merely a defensive alliance.
Would we take their word for it?
I would hope not.
Yeah, yeah.
Simple as that.
I mean, if you put the shoe on the other foot, then overthrowing the government in Canada or something like that, I mean, the H-bombs would already been lit off a long time ago.
All right.
Anyway, I'm sorry I kept you way over time here, James.
I got to cut you off.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show.
I really appreciate having you.
Thanks, Scott.
Take care.
All right, so that's James Carden.
You can find him at ConsortiumNews.com, The National Interest and EastWestAccord.com.
Now featuring Chuck Hagel.
Man, that's progress, right?
Back in one sec.
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