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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Hey, guys, on the line, I've got Ted Galen Carpenter, Senior Fellow in Security Studies at Cato and Contributing Editor at The National Interest and at antiwar.com.
I will have, you know, and he is the author of 12 books and his latest is called NATO, the Dangerous Dinosaur.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Ted?
Doing fine, Scott.
Thank you very much for having me back on your show.
Really happy to talk to you again.
And so we have a real problem to discuss.
Our border dispute with Russia, of course, they've been intervening heavily in northern Mexico lately.
Oh, wait, no.
America is intervening 5,000 miles east of D.C.
And we have a border dispute with Russia in Ukraine.
Tell us everything about it, sir.
What's going on over there?
Yeah, that is absolutely amazing.
If you listen to American political and military leaders, they insist that Ukraine is absolutely essential to America's security, that maintaining not only Ukraine's independence, but the borders it had in 2014 before Russia's annexation of Crimea in response to the U.S.-sponsored revolution, and I use the word in quotes, in Ukraine, that if we don't defend those boundaries, that's a terrible threat to America's own security and well-being.
This is just the latest in Washington's efforts to crowd Russia as much as possible, as often as possible.
And it's creating a very dangerous crisis.
OK, Ted, so let's go back to 2014.
And well, I'll just say real quick, everybody knows USA helped do the coup in Kiev and overthrew the more pro-Russia-leaning President Yanukovych.
And then the east of the country, basically the eastern region, Donbass, Donetsk and Luhansk, they refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new coup junta even after they held an election.
And so then the government in Kiev launched what they called a war on terrorism and invaded the east of the country, attacked the east of the country.
And so they fought for a couple of years.
And now we got a peace deal.
Go ahead and I guess take us through once the war started, what all has happened?
If you could give us like a kind of a thumbnail history of the fighting in the Donbass, because that was back in 2014 was when that all happened.
Six, seven years ago.
So give us a bit of a refresher course about where we were then and how we got to where we are now.
Well, I think it's important to recognize that there have been fairly deep divisions in Ukraine throughout.
There's a big difference between the eastern part of the country, mostly Russian speaking, and the western part, which is much more pro-West, pro-NATO, very nationalistic, including some rather unsavory ultra-nationalist, if not outright fascist and pro-Nazi elements.
So there's always been a somewhat fragile country.
And when the United States helped demonstrators overthrow the elected pro-Russia government in 2014, not only did Russia respond by annexing Crimea, mainly to protect its important naval base at Sevastopol, but the residents in the eastern part of the country felt that they were going to be second class citizens with respect to this new government at best.
And the new government gave every indication that they would be treated that way.
So at least in part of the eastern portion of Ukraine, a rebellion broke out.
The fighting has ebbed and flowed.
There have been several ceasefire agreements, the most durable of which is the so-called Minsk Agreement, concluded in the capital city of Belarus.
And that has held reasonably well until recently.
The Ukrainian government has moved more aggressively to suppress the secessionist rebellion, and Russia in turn has moved some of its military forces closer to the border with Ukraine, letting the government in Kiev, I think, receive a message that if it attempts to crush the separatists in the east, that could lead to a direct fight with Russia.
So that's the situation we're in.
Now one would think smart U.S. leaders would want to stay as far away from that quarrel as we possibly could.
This is crossing a really bright red line in terms of Russia's security.
Russia, I don't believe, will back down with regard to a confrontation over Ukraine.
Russian leaders, and I don't think this is just true of Vladimir Putin, I think almost any Russian government would resist having Ukraine become a NATO forward staging area.
And that appears to be the goal of U.S. policymakers, at least.
That is really provoking a dangerous confrontation with Russia.
Boy, Ted, I'm not one to hope for change too much or anything like that, but I do, I admit, sometimes rely a little bit on some of the older senators to intervene a little bit.
You saw this even with the worst of the demonization and the entirely fake hoax that Donald Trump was a secret Russian agent.
Even at the height of that, people like Dianne Feinstein would say things like, well, you know, we still want to keep this nuke treaty, though, because that's important, you know.
And in this case, in fact, Biden did keep the New START treaty that Trump was letting expire, which is probably the single greatest thing that he's ever done in his lifetime so far.
But it seems like there's a real lack of discussion here, or maybe too narrow of a discussion taking place inside the White House where everyone agrees about this and no one is willing to say, well, you know, come on, though, at the end of the day, if Russia invades Ukraine, we're not going to fight them because we could all die in that.
And so mutually assured destruction and all that.
Right, everybody.
It sounds like that part of the conversation is not taking place.
It's just a bunch of people agreeing that like, hey, this aggression will not stand.
Right.
I'm not going to be the weakest guy in the room.
So, yeah.
And then they just go on from there.
Is it really that simple?
I think they're assuming that Russia will back down if the U.S. just takes a strong stance on behalf of its Ukrainian ally.
And we ought to ask just when did Ukraine become an ally of the United States?
I mean, this is territory that used to be part of the Soviet Union.
It certainly was not considered an important U.S. interest, much less a vital U.S. interest during the Cold War.
But suddenly, apparently by osmosis, it became a vital interest of the United States in the current era against a much weaker non-communist Russia.
That makes no sense for the U.S. to take that kind of risk to defend a country on Russia's border and to stir up trouble in that country, which is what the Obama administration did with its 2014 policy, is madness.
But I really think they believe the current crop of policymakers, the current crop of hawks in Congress on both sides of the aisle, they assume that Russia will back down, that there will be no war, much less a nuclear war, between the United States and Russia.
If they're not assuming that, then they truly are adopting an insane policy, because the consequences would be horrific for everybody in both countries and beyond.
Yeah, it seems like it's just, again, a symptom of this consensus.
I hate getting into this, because it's just too abstract to me to seem like it's really so important, but I guess it really is, this exceptionalism, where they have no idea how crazy they sound when they say the Russians are moving troops around right on Ukraine's border.
In other words, they're moving troops around at Russian military bases inside Russia.
Well, at the same time, they're saying, therefore, we're moving our defensive assets around in Latvia and Norway and Poland and the Black Sea.
Huh?
And we're the ones defending from Russian aggression?
And I mean, I guess it only sounds silly to you and me and everybody else.
They just take that for granted that, of course, that that's right.
It's one of the most evident aspects of poisonous groupthink in Washington.
The political and foreign policy elites are unbelievably detached from the rest of the population.
The way normal people think is not the way they think.
I think any objective observer would look at the way the United States and its NATO allies have conducted policy really since the mid-1990s, and if asked which side has been engaging in the provocations, which side has been engaging in desperate, often defensive responses, the conclusion of a reasonable objective observer is that the United States and NATO have been the ones engaging in provocations and threats, and that Russia has been reacting as any beleaguered country would by trying to protect its core security interests.
As you mentioned at the beginning, we don't see Russia trying to create a powerful military alliance, the most powerful one in the world, and move it up to the borders of the United States.
The United States has been doing that since the mid-1990s, moving the most powerful military alliance in the history of the world right up to the borders of Russia, and somehow expecting that the Russians will either consider this unthreatening, or they will just cower and crawl away with their tail between their legs.
What we're finding is they're not going to do that.
To some extent, they did that back in the 1990s and the first few years of the 21st century.
They're not doing it anymore, and when they struck back in Georgia in 2008, that should have been a message to US policymakers that the days of Russia just caving in were over.
If they didn't get the message that time, US policymakers should have gotten it when the Putin government annexed Crimea following the US actions in Ukraine in 2014.
We still don't seem to get it.
The provocations continue, and they grow worse.
You mentioned the situation with Norway, where for the first time in NATO's history, the United States moved nuclear-capable B-1B bombs into Norway, and yet somehow our policymakers don't seem to think that should be considered threatening by people in Russia.
I don't know what world they live in if they make those kinds of assumptions.
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On that particular point, Ted, about the B-1s, I interviewed Kingston Reef from one of these arms control something-somethings, and to him it was very meaningful that under the treaties the B-1s are not nuclear capable and that they would have to be completely kind of retooled in order to be able to deliver nuclear weapons quickly, and so he was against the provocation of flying B-1s over the Baltics the way they were doing and moving them into Norway and all that, but I guess he and I had discussed it on Twitter, and he was correcting me when I overstated it that these are nuclear capable bombers, and he said that they're not anymore, but do you disagree with that, because they can be converted back to nuclear capable so easily, or how does that work?
It doesn't take that much of a conversion process, and the Russians are going to assume a worst case scenario.
I think we have to realize that given all the other provocations, when you pile this on top of those provocations, they're going to be very deeply concerned.
This is just not smart foreign policy by any reasonable definition.
I'm really glad that you brought up the brief Georgia war of 2008 there, early August 2008, where the Georgians started it by attacking these regions, these semi-autonomous zones that were occupied by Russian peacekeepers at the time, and in the U.S. media, it was during the presidential campaign, Obama versus McCain, and everybody just pretended, especially John McCain and everyone else followed his lead, that Russia started the war.
It was Russian aggression, Russian aggression, and for those of us who were up late that night, there was no question anywhere in the world, all the initial news reports came out that Georgia is invading South Ossetia, and the Russians didn't respond for a while.
There was no question at all for people who knew, but the New York Times went along with it, and there was even a funny moment at the presidential debate where John McCain tells the lie, and Brokaw and Obama and McCain all make this weird eye contact, like, we discussed this earlier, and we decided we're going to go with the lie here, so go ahead, Obama, so Brokaw doesn't correct him at all or follow up or anything, and then Obama picks up the trail right where McCain left off.
Yes, this Russian aggression, something is going to have to be done.
Oh, and one more thing about that that I know about it was that there are two different sources on this.
One of them was Susskind, and I forgot the other one, that said that Cheney wanted to attack the Russians as they were coming through the tunnels under the Caucasus Mountains, and that Bush Jr. then said, all right, who agrees with the vice president, we ought to attack Russia, and nobody raised their hand, and they moved on to the next subject after that, but more importantly than, well, both things, right?
We could have got into a war, but also, Washington, D.C., they knew they were lying, and they were happy to lie to each other and to all of us, and this is just the consensus.
It's like, you can't challenge it.
It's like denying the divinity of the most popular religion in town or whatever.
This is a thing we all believe together, and that's it.
Well, Scott, I have seen stories and heard accounts within the last year repeating that falsehood that Russia started that war.
Even the European Union created a commission and investigated the start of the war in Georgia, and that commission, and obviously that's not composed of pro-Russian types, concluded that Georgia started the fighting, so that is really indisputable.
All the evidence indicates that, and yet this falsehood persists.
Most Americans, if they've ever heard of the war in Georgia and didn't think it referred the civil war in our own country and the fighting in Georgia at that time, if they have the context right, most of them absolutely buy the version that Russia started that war.
Is this a matter of self-delusion on the part of our governing elite, or is it just a systematic campaign of deception?
I think the latter is more likely, but certainly the falsehood persists, and surprisingly so.
That's the thing, is that all these falsehoods add up to this pattern of aggression.
Look at when Putin started the civil war in Syria, remember that?
Whichever the narrative is, they never have to concede their own role in kicking these things off, and then so they end up building an entire narrative of time after time after time Putin is doing all of these terrible things.
When actually he helped Obama avoid outright war in Syria, while at the same time he was twisting the Ayatollah's arm and telling him, I want you to sign this nuclear deal, and was actually being a good friend to America under the Obama government.
Well, Putin started out, I think, trying to be as friendly as possible to the United States.
You remember following the 9-11 attacks, the Putin government gave the United States authorization to take military action against Afghanistan without any interference on Russia's part.
Indeed, they facilitated the use of American military units, which they could easily have obstructed, given their presence and given the influence they have over Central Asian countries bordering Afghanistan.
They did nothing of the sort.
The Russian government, in fact, proved to be very, very helpful.
The point where Putin seems to break with the United States and NATO emphatically comes in 2007.
That was his first warning shot when he spoke to the annual Munich conference on security.
He warned the United States and the West, you are provoking us again and again and again with the expansion of NATO, with so-called rotating deployments of U.S. military forces to the new NATO countries in Eastern Europe.
The actions of the United States and NATO in the Balkans, going after the Serbian faction in Bosnia, and of course, amputating Kosovo from Serbia.
The United States and the other Western leaders were just oblivious to what he was warning, that Russia would no longer back down.
The very matter of months later, the U.S. orchestrated this ad hoc coalition to grant Kosovo independence from Serbia, again, a humiliating rebuke to Russia.
The U.S. State Department added insult to injury by then saying, well, this ad hoc effort to grant Kosovo independence, bypassing the UN Security Council and a likely Russian veto, that doesn't set any precedent.
Why?
Well, because we said it, it doesn't set a precedent.
A few months later, I think Russia sent a counter message with its response to Georgia's military move, and it showed that yes, we will enforce certain measures in our own neighborhood.
We're no longer going to just give in to the United States and NATO.
Relations have continued to deteriorate ever since that time.
I think that was really the last chance in 2007, 2008, to repair relations with Russia.
And U.S. leaders just spurned that opportunity.
I'll tell you what, to overthrowing the government in Ukraine twice in 10 years, you imagine how that looks to the Russians.
And then, you know, again, it was the, I don't think there's any dispute at all that it was the Kiev government that attacked the Donbass region for trying to declare autonomy from them.
And even though the Russian, you know, the Putin government did send special operations forces to help the, I guess they call them ethnic Russians, I don't know exactly how that works.
I think they're all Slavs, aren't they?
But anyway, to help the pro-Russian side defend themselves from the onslaught from Kiev, they voted to join Russia in a plebiscite and Putin told them, yet, I don't want, that's, I think I forgot which experts it was, it may have been Eric Margulies who told me from the very beginning, Russia doesn't want the Donbass with its decrepit, completely obsolete old industries and its aging pension age population to add to their dole and all that.
All they're trying to do is protect these people and not absorb them.
And then that proved to be exactly correct.
Oh, Moscow wants a security buffer given NATO's constant advancement.
And I think if the United States doesn't recognize that point, that Moscow will not allow a Western military client in Ukraine.
Ukraine has to at least keep some distance from NATO.
Western leaders are, again, especially U.S. leaders, are pushing for full-blown Ukraine membership in NATO.
That Putin and other Russian leaders have made it clear that will not be tolerated.
And I think U.S. leaders ignore that warning at not only their peril, but at our peril.
This is crossing a bright red line as far as Russia is concerned.
The United States needs to stop meddling in Ukraine.
It is incredibly dangerous.
All right.
Well, listen, I think it's important to emphasize how lucky we are at Antiwar.com that we have you and Doug Bondow, both real experts on this, writing for us now.
But I have to mention too, and I hope that you've noticed and have been reading him, that we've got this guy Rick Rosoff, who Eric Garris informs me used to write for Antiwar.com back before my time, 20 plus years ago, which I'm at about 17, 18 years in here, but from way back.
And he's back and is a real expert on this.
And so we have Rick Rosoff, Dave DeCamp, and Jason Ditz, all three writing original news stories at news.antiwar.com.
They're in the top section of our front page every day now, and all of them are just killing it.
And this guy is a real expert and just has story after story, sometimes four or five stories a day about this.
I can't imagine, well, and this would always be the case, but especially now, there's nowhere better than Antiwar.com for people to keep up with this stuff, you know, in real time.
But I don't know if you saw this headline.
I got to get your response to this.
Ukraine's top commander invokes NATO's Article 5 military assistance clause as West continues to oversee Ukraine's war in the Donbass.
Can they do that?
Does that mean I can invoke NATO's Article 5 military assistance clause?
Well, they can try to do anything they want, but they're acting as though Ukraine is a full NATO member.
And unfortunately, U.S. leaders, especially with the onset of the Biden administration, have been treating Ukraine as though it is a full-blown NATO member.
To me, that is incredibly dangerous.
It encourages Kiev to take an uncompromising stance toward both the separatists in the Donbass and toward Russia, confident that the United States and NATO will back Kiev up militarily if it comes to an armed confrontation with Russia.
To me, that's the same mistake that George W. Bush made when he encouraged Georgia to think that it was a full-fledged ally of the United States and that the U.S. and NATO would ride to the rescue if Georgia became embroiled in a war with Russia.
Well, the Georgian government eventually found out differently, and I hope that if a conflict broke out in Ukraine, that Kiev would find out differently.
But I worry that it's not the case this time, that the U.S. would actually try to come to Ukraine's defense.
It's just dangerous to let client states think that they have a full-fledged security guarantee because they're likely to act in an irresponsible manner, just as Georgia did in 2008.
Yeah, well, you're absolutely right.
And I'm sorry I'm out of time, but I'll leave everybody with these two.
And I got this wrong before.
I put the wrong quote in the wrong place.
It's William Burns, the current director of the CIA.
Biden's director of the CIA.
He was the one who, he's in the WikiLeaks talking with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister.
And the title is Nyet Means Nyet.
And everybody can read this at WikiLeaks.
And it's Lavrov, he explicitly says, and we don't have to take his word at this, but at least this was the posture.
He says, we reject the idea of spheres of influence, even for us.
We are not trying to claim the Baltics or Ukraine are our sphere of influence, but we're just saying they shouldn't be yours either.
That's all.
And, and, you know, we shouldn't be doing like this.
It's very reasonable.
And then the, and this was the quote that I always put in his mouth mistakenly, but it's actually Vladimir Putin himself who told a European minister, I think on a hot mic situation, or maybe he just ratted on him later.
But Putin had told this European minister, you know, we could be in Kiev in two weeks.
Which sounds to me like, hey, Trump card, this game is over.
That's it.
That's the royal flush.
Whatever you got comes to it.
We he's signaling his willingness to invade and conquer half the country, which is what Colonel Douglas MacGregor is warning in the American conservative magazine today as well, that this is probably what they would do.
I think that is a real danger.
I don't believe that Russia wants to take over Ukraine.
I mean, the gigantic political and economic headaches that would ensue trying to rule over a hostile country and a country that is an economic basket case to boot.
Those that would be a very daunting task.
But if it comes to undertaking that burden or letting Ukraine become NATO's forward staging area on Russia's border, I'm very much afraid that Moscow will move militarily against Ukraine.
All right, you guys, that is Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow at Cato and contributing editor at Antiwar.com.
And check out this one at The National Interest.
Joe Biden's Ukraine policy, a repeat of George W.
Bush in Georgia.
Excellent.
And his new book, his latest book is NATO, The Dangerous Dinosaur.
It's from 2019.
So very current.
Thank you, sir.
Really appreciate that.
Thank you, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
