Hey y'all, so here's the thing, I'm giving a speech to the Tarrant County Libertarian Party on April the 28th, that's Saturday, April the 28th, from 2 to 4, Central Time, up there in Fort Worth, so if you're anywhere near the 200 square miles of concrete known as Dallas-Fort Worth, head on out there, and I'll see you, it'll be cool.
I'll sell you a book.
Oh, you can find out all about it at eventbrite.com.
Oh, and I guess I'll write up a blog entry too at the Libertarian Institute and at scotthorton.org.
Sorry I'm late, I had to stop by the Whites 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, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our name, bitch, 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.
All right, you guys, introducing Ted Snyder.
He is such a great writer.
We run him all the time at antiwar.com, and you can find him at Consortium News and other places too.
Accusing Russia, listening to history.
Welcome back to the show, Ted.
How are you?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on the show.
You know what?
I really love reading your stuff, and it's cool because it's kind of my job to read your stuff.
It's one of my jobs.
I got a lot of jobs.
And you know all this stuff.
So, tell them.
Let's talk about the history of the Cold War since the end of the Cold War.
What the hell?
That's my first question for you.
What the hell, Ted?
So, you know, it's like the West keeps, since the Cold War, you know, since it ended, the West keeps hurling all these charges at Russia.
And what struck me in looking at them is that when you get the pattern of the accusations we hurl against Russia, and then you look back at the historical record, and it consistently looks like it's more the West that's guilty of the very things they're charging Russia of.
So, I wanted to kind of compare what we say Russia did with the historical record of who really did it.
And I did that by dividing it into sort of three big charges we throw against Russia.
You know, one is that Russia intervened in American elections.
The other is that Russia seems to be dragging us back into a Cold War.
A lot of people talk about the new Cold War.
And the third is that, you know, Russia is becoming increasingly belligerent and expansionist and trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union.
So, I looked at those charges of election interference, starting a new Cold War, and expansionism.
And I wanted to see if the historical record really stood up against Russia, or whether it was really us that was guilty of those things.
Yeah.
Well, and surprise, surprise, what did you find?
Yeah, surprise, surprise, I found that in all three cases that there was a stronger historical case against the West than there was against Russia.
You know what, I think even if you just dumb it down and you're somebody who's not even all that political and you don't pay that much attention, you can pretty much tell, can't you, that America wasn't a good sport after the Soviet Union fell.
That they basically took every advantage that they could, right?
Tell us about Boris Yeltsin.
Who's Boris Yeltsin?
So, Yeltsin was, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States wanted to make absolutely sure that what emerged from the rubble was a democracy, Yeltsin was the guy that they supported as the guy that they thought they could sort of puppet him to usher in a democracy.
And so, America wanted to make absolutely sure that Yeltsin was the leader.
And so, what happens is that on two occasions in 1991 and 1996, America intervenes to make sure, in 91 they intervene to make sure Yeltsin stays in power.
And in 1996, they boldly and explicitly intervene in a Russian election.
And so boldly that you've got three political consultants paid by America actually running Yeltsin's campaign with a phone line to Clinton's office where they'd actually brief Clinton and Clinton would give advice.
They'd actually run Yeltsin's campaign and they ran it and they funded it.
And this is a guy that coming to the election had a popularity in Russia of about 6%.
Like he was dead.
And they run his campaign and he wins the campaign by 13%.
Well, and as you're saying here, they gave him $2.5 billion of aid to pass around to buy up some votes with too.
Yeah.
In 91, they gave him $2.5 billion.
In 96, the International Monetary Fund gives Yeltsin over $10 billion.
It's the second biggest loan they've ever given.
The States backs the loan.
Yeltsin wins the election.
And in 96, this was not even so top secret.
They made a movie about it even.
Yeah.
Spinning Boris.
I didn't see that.
Actually, I've downloaded like two-thirds of it from the Pirate Bay, but then it stopped.
So I haven't had a chance to actually watch it yet.
I have most of the file in my folder.
The New York Times – sorry, not the New York Times – Time magazine actually runs a cover story.
And the story is called Yanks to the Rescue, the secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win.
So this is out there in the public domain.
The U.S. ambassador to Russia goes on record saying that in the 96 Russian election, he says, without our leadership, we'd see a considerably different Russia today.
That's an open confession of election interference.
So here you've got today this accusation that Russia interfered in American elections.
And we're not talking ancient history.
Twenty years ago, America was right up front confessing that they completely manipulated the Russian elections to make sure that Boris Yeltsin will stay in power.
So there's a really clear historical record of U.S. interference in Russian politics and directly in Russian elections.
And I know this is a little bit outside of the theme of your article, where it's the mirror image of the accusations here.
But we should mention here, too, that this American-imposed economic shock therapy was not like turning their country over to a free market as much as it was giving – I lost you there for a minute.
Yeah, giving the government-owned assets to a chosen few at the expense of everyone else, which really hurt the Russian people.
Yeah.
So, I mean, Yeltsin brings in this shock doctrine, this capitalism, that the Russian economy pretty much collapses.
And that's why between 1991 and 1996, his popularity drops below zero.
He's got popularity that are non-existent.
Polls showed 6% support, and yet Americans were able to swing the election to go from 6% support to a 13% victory.
This was not a popular president.
This was a president that the Russian parliament had impeached by a 636-to-2 vote, and the Americans intervened and supported Yeltsin against the impeachment.
This is America keeping him in power and making sure he's re-elected when the Russian people had clearly expressed that they didn't want him in.
So, this is not subtle election manipulation.
This is bold election manipulation by America to make sure the guy they want in Russia is in and stays in for a while.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's an important point, too, because I remember the propaganda from back then was it was the Communist Party was trying to come back.
And yet, that's still, and I forgot who it was I talked to about this, if it was Ray McGovern or who it was, we talked about this point a little while back, about how that did not mean anything like the return of the Soviet Union.
All that threatened to do was, you know, keep a big, you know, safety net, high taxes and basically socialism, but not communism, not the state taking back over all of industry and property and all of that kind of thing.
So, they were going to basically be a European welfare state.
And that probably wouldn't have been the problem.
It was just who they were and whose orders they were taking compared to Yeltsin's willingness to do what he wanted, what they wanted him to do.
It was making sure they could draw Russian into a Western sphere.
Gorbachev had long ago dissolved communism.
He was clear that going forward, he wanted Russia to be, you know, sort of a socialist state.
But communism was not, and I talked about this in the article, you know, communism was not something that was ended by the Cold War.
Gorbachev voluntarily dissolved the Soviet Union and offered America a way out of the Cold War.
America always reports this as if, you know, we won the Cold War and the Soviet Union had to give up communism.
But it was quite the other way around.
And no, this was nothing like the return of the Soviet Union.
And Putin's actions today are nothing like an attempt to return Russia to a, you know, a large Soviet empire.
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Thanks.
All right, so yeah, now Gorbachev, you talk about in here how important it is.
You know, these things get truncated when you look back on them.
But it was really 1988, the fall of 1988 through Christmas 1991 was the real end of the Cold War.
But it took that long for the Soviet Union to finally cease existing here.
And this really was a very deliberate decision by Gorbachev to just say, I think as you put it in here, the Americans refused at first to believe it or accept it.
And he was just saying, screw you, I'm going to kill you with kindness.
I refuse to have a Cold War with you.
Let's just get along.
And you know what, go ahead and open up the border at Vienna, I think, or somewhere in Austria was first, right?
And then shortly after the wall came down and just go ahead and let it all slide.
And then eventually pull the troops out of Eastern Europe.
He didn't have to do that.
I mean, communism is not viable as an economic thing over the long term.
But, you know, they were trying to have some prices and adapt to that.
He didn't have to do what he did.
Yeah, I mean, the analysis has shown that the Soviet Union could have gone on for a very long time, the way it was going on without collapsing.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a voluntary move by Gorbachev.
It was nothing that was forced on him.
And he was visionary.
I mean, what Gorbachev was trying to say is that we don't need to have two hostile spheres, that we can imagine a Europe and a transatlantic, you know, the States-Europe world in which we cooperate.
And, you know, I talk about Richard Sakwa's, you know, new book.
It's a really impressive book.
And, you know, he argues really, really clearly in this book that Gorbachev offered a way that we could get out of the Cold War paradigm and have Russia and the States, you know, in the same community operating as equals, where we don't need to have camps or blocks or pacts.
But America wasn't open to this.
And the only way they could see the end of the Cold War was as having two sides, and we beat you, and so we'll draw you into our camp as an inferior with no say.
All America could see when Russia kept offering a way to transcend the Cold War into a new world order where they were equal partners.
Russia wasn't asking for equal, but a respected, consulted partner.
But all America could see was the world in camps still, and they could only envision it as drawing a losing Russia into a camp.
And that's why I say in my piece that it's not Russia that brought us back to the Cold War.
Gorbachev and Russia, and, in fact, every leader since Gorbachev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin, especially in his first two terms, were all offering a way of leaving the Cold War and partnering with America.
And it was America that consisted on always pressing the paradigm of the Cold War back down and saying, no, we're two camps and you're the loser, and refusing Russia's offer to get out of a Cold War.
Now, at some point in the 90s, I know they started with the NATO expansion pretty early in 1996, maybe even before that, but at the same time, there was this current of, let's bring Russia into NATO.
And I don't mean to put too much weight on this, but Tom Clancy had a novel like that, where they brought Russia into NATO in order to fight China.
You had Strobe Talbot, who was Bill Clinton's college roommate and national security advisor for a time, and was almost the head of the CIA, although that got quashed.
Anyway, you know, they had talked about, they created this Russia-NATO council, and they had talked about bringing Russia into NATO, and that was actually part of the excuse of why it was okay to expand NATO, was because this isn't part of any kind of Cold War.
This has nothing to do with intimidating Russia or anything else in any sense.
We're just making friends and spreading security and this kind of thing, and spinning it as though the Russians won't mind because eventually they'll be in on it too.
But then it sure didn't work out that way.
No, and I think there's two really interesting things about what you said, Scott, and I think that the first one is that the problem with those early attempts is that all the organizations that the States was willing to form that looked like they were bringing Russia in would never bring Russia in as an equal partner with an acknowledged sphere of influence.
It always brought Russia in as the defeated Russia.
You've got to give up your way of life.
You've got to adopt the Western.
You've got to transform and become us.
It was never a viable option for Russia.
Putin continued, though, to try to get into NATO as a regular NATO member, even though he kept being disappointed.
And, you know, when he was asked in an interview if he would, I forget, I think it was a New York Times interview, Thomas Friedman or someone asked Putin, would you join Russia?
And Putin said, why not?
And, you know, this kind of went, it wasn't taken seriously.
But, you know, there are people who are at meetings who have notes that show really clearly that in the early 2000s, Putin had actually entered quite seriously into informal talks about Russia really joining NATO as a full, regular, equal NATO member.
And the States vetoed it.
America, you know, they squashed it.
So, I mean, there is a possible world in which Russia today would be a NATO member and there'd be no Cold War.
But the States squashed it.
And, you know, after that, Putin continued to try to show that even though he's not NATO, he can work with NATO.
You know, and after 9-11.
Hold that thought for a second, because that's an important point.
But just on this, I got to say what's funny is in the 1990s, this is my ultimate worst nightmare of the proof of the New World Order conspiracy all come true.
That Russia and America would join together with NATO.
We would have a one white world army of the North at war against Islamic South Asia.
And fight forever together under, you know, the baby blue flag and all of this kind of thing.
So, I'm not saying I prefer Cold War.
I just prefer, you know, NATO dissolving and America not having a foreign policy whatsoever, of course, is the ideal here.
And I don't think you're necessarily advocating a one world, you know, alliance army either.
Just this is the choice that the Democrats and Republicans had before them.
You know, there was Ron Paul, but the rest of them were debating, do we use NATO against Russia?
Do we make them part of it somehow?
And, you know, Russia never under much of a debate.
I think Russia never understood why there was a NATO after the Cold War.
I mean, I think Russia said, you know, in 91 we dissolved the Warsaw Pact.
And, I mean, Putin said in one of his speeches that, you know, NATO was there because of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.
And Putin said there is no more Soviet Union and there is no more Warsaw Pact.
So, you know, I don't even know what NATO is for.
And NATO was supposed to be a security organization to prevent, you know, danger from the Soviet Union.
And what it did instead is when the Soviet Union disappeared so there was no danger, this thing that was supposed to stop dangerous Soviet Union started eating up territory, you know, former Warsaw Pact countries and actually created the very security concern it was meant to prevent.
Because now there's no Soviet Union, there's no security concern.
You encroach on the Soviet Union moving into Georgia, the Ukraine, suddenly the Soviet Union needs to defend itself.
And you've created the very hostility.
NATO has become the most self-contradictory organization in the world.
It's meant to make security from Russia and its very actions are threatening Russia so that there's a security problem with Russia.
It's anachronism.
It's a contradiction.
Yeah.
And then I'm sorry, audience, for beating this dead horse, but maybe some of you never heard this before.
I think it's worth bringing up, you know.
You talk about George Kennan here and his interview with Thomas Friedman, where he warns basically against doing this.
And he says in there, I'm not sure if this is the same quote you use.
Oh, well, this is one of the great quotes of it.
We're turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove the Soviet regime.
How can we be backstabbing the Russians that killed Soviet communism?
Yeah, and Scott, this is the guy that fathered the Soviet economic policy.
This is no Russia lover.
This is Mr. X that wrote On the Sources of Soviet Conduct for Foreign Affairs in 48 or whatever.
And this is a 1998 interview.
And he says, don't people understand our differences in the Cold War with the Soviet communist regime?
And now we're turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that very Soviet regime.
So this is Kennan saying you don't get it.
You know, the Cold War didn't end it, that Russia and Gorbachev got rid of the Soviet Union and a bloodless revolution.
And that's what we were trying to do.
And they're on our side.
But rather than embracing them, we could never see past the old Soviet Union.
That's what I said in my piece.
They kept handing us Russia and we just kept seeing the Soviet Union.
They did the job for us.
The Cold War, NATO never got rid of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev got rid of the Soviet Union.
And then he turns it into Russia and offers us a partnership.
And we reject the partnership and keep the Cold War paradigm and it goes on.
And by the way, everybody, for the footnote here, the 1998 interview with Kennan by Thomas Friedman is called And Now A Word From X.
He's Mr. X there, the author of the containment policy.
And now the other important thing that he says in there is I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen here.
The Russians are going to react to this NATO expansion.
NATO, everybody, that's America's military alliance in Europe.
The Russians are going to react to this.
And then all the people who are responsible for expanding NATO will say who now tell us that don't worry, this isn't about threatening Russia.
And so they won't feel threatened and it's totally fine.
When the Russians react, they will say, aha, this is why we need NATO expansion to contain a rising Russia and blah, blah, blah.
When it's their fault in the first place, which is of course exactly what's happened.
Right.
That's exactly the self-contradiction.
This was 20 years ago was this interview where he said that.
And it wasn't just Kennan, Scott.
Everybody was telling this.
In fact, in 2007 or 2008, it was 2007 when NATO first says that we'd be long term willing to welcome Ukraine and Georgia in.
Germany vetoes it.
Germany says you're crazy.
You're encroaching on Russia.
This is exactly what's going to cause war with Russia.
And it's not just the Americans.
Germany's telling the states like this is going to be a disaster.
This is going to be a Cold War.
This is exactly what you can't do.
This is why you despite talk right now that, you know, because Ukraine's really looking to get into NATO now.
I don't think they're going to get in for a while because even though the states is probably going to be cheerleading it, you know, I think Germany and France are still going to be saying there's no way we can go right into the Russian heartland and right up to the Russian border.
And, you know, you bring Ukraine and Georgia.
And Russia said all along that's the total red line because, you know, Russia didn't mind EU encroachment.
They didn't mind the EU expanding.
It was only when EU expansion became tied to NATO membership so that EU expansion meant, you know, a hostile army bumping up against our borders that Russia got, you know, prickly about expansion.
And they made it really clear that, you know, Ukraine and Georgia, that's just where it has to stop.
And it was Kenan saying you can't do this and Angela Merkel saying you can't do this.
Everybody was telling me you can't do this.
It's not been a secret that Russia is not going to allow NATO to bump right into its border, right into its heartland.
All right.
And now, so maybe we'll get back to Ukraine.
I guess I'll just throw in, yeah, we overthrew the government there twice in 10 years.
And that's what led to the seizure of the Crimean Peninsula back in 2014.
But anyway, so you talk about, you talk about that, but in the context of this meeting, and now we know because the paperwork's been released last December, it all finally came out about the sworn promise of the George Bush senior administration to the Soviets that if they let East Germany go, that America would not expand NATO one inch east of Germany.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so, you know, the Cold War ends.
And there's this meeting in February of 1990 to discuss, you know, the division of Germany.
And the promise is made by James Baker, who's Bush's secretary of state at the time, that we won't, you know, move one inch to the east.
And that line has been the most ambiguous line, you know, in modern history, because nobody wrote anything down and explicitly one inch to the east meant not into eastern Germany.
But it was really, really clear that NATO meant that we're not going to go east of Germany at all.
And in fact, the same day that Baker says this, the Germans are at the meetings too.
And, you know, Germany says, this is actually a quote now, Germany makes it really clear.
They say, for us, one thing is certain, NATO will not expand to the east.
And then just to make it clear, he says, as far as the non-expansion of NATO, this applies in general.
We're not moving to the east at all.
So there's this promise that NATO is not going to go east of Germany.
And everybody knows this.
The NATO general secretary at the time says really clearly, he says, the fact that we're ready not to place NATO army outside Germany gives the Soviet Union security.
I mean, it was all over that NATO wasn't going to move east.
And then what happens immediately after that, well, not immediately, but soon after the promise that NATO won't move east, NATO gobbles up 13 former Soviet countries.
They gobble up 13.
And we have the audacity to call Russia expansionist.
And NATO gobbles up 13 countries and moves right up to Russia.
And Russia doesn't do anything back.
Russia doesn't do anything back until it gets to Georgia and Ukraine.
And even by the time it gets to Georgia and Ukraine, Russia doesn't do anything until NATO starts it.
In other words, Georgia and Ukraine were not examples of Russian expansionism.
They were examples of Russia being forced into defending itself against NATO expansionism.
Yeah, I mean, in Georgia, when the war broke out in 2008, they could have conquered all of Georgia.
They didn't.
All they did was guarantee the independence of South Ossetia.
And I guess they took a couple more miles than that, just to prove a point.
And they don't even, Russia doesn't even go into South Ossetia until Georgia had broken the truce and bombed South Ossetia.
I mean, it's really clear from European investigators that even though Russia was upset about what was happening in Georgia, they didn't go in until South Ossetia had been attacked.
And also in Ukraine, you know, they didn't go further than they had to.
I mean, Putin talks about this, but after Russia honors the Crimean referendum and lets Crimea come back to Russia, the two other eastern provinces in the Donbass region, they also want to hold referendums and come back to Russia.
And Putin does everything he can to stop them from holding referendums.
And when they defy him and hold the referendums and ask to join Russia, Putin says no.
So this is not Putin trying to take as much of Ukraine as he can.
He took what he felt was as little as he had to, and he took as little as he had to because he saw it as, you know, a Western coup that was pulling Crimea and Russia's port out of the Russian sphere into the Western sphere.
So he does what he has to do to defend against NATO expansionism.
And then he doesn't go farther, even though parts of Ukraine are asking him to go farther, you know, he says no.
This is not crazy extensionism, right?
This is a terrified and threatened country watching NATO break its promise that it made in the Cold War and move closer and closer and closer to its doorstep.
Right.
Well, and it's also worth mentioning, it's kind of an obscure footnote, but the UK Parliament, James Carden pointed this out, the UK Parliament report showed that there were three or I think it was three former Ukrainian presidents signed a statement saying that we must kick the Russians out of Crimea now.
And that was the point at which they actually went ahead with their little green men and seized the peninsula without killing anyone.
A couple of warning shots fired in the air.
Yeah.
And Scott, the other thing to remember, too, is talking about, you know, kicking Russia out is that there was a referendum in Crimea.
So, you know, under international law, strictly speaking, Ukraine wasn't consulted.
I don't know if you'd call the annexation completely legal or not, but from a domestic perspective of an overwhelming majority of people in the Crimea in the referendum asked to be brought back into Russia.
So it's not, it's not Russia's the aggressor, it's Russia defending against NATO encroachment.
And then it's Russia not responding until, you know, most Crimeans requested the annexation.
This is not a forced annexation where people should be saying, you know, respect the will of the people and get out of Ukraine.
It's not forced.
And as I said, I think before earlier, when the referendum were held in Donbass and Russia could have gone further if they wanted, they didn't.
Right.
So this isn't, you know, this isn't rampant expansionism.
It's, it's, it's defense against NATO encroachment.
Pass a red line that Russia had set for a long time.
You know, in Georgia and Ukraine, you can't pass that red line.
And it's important to look at that, you know, I don't know if you want to talk about this after too, but if you look at the agreement that was being offered to Ukraine by the European Union, this was no innocent financial agreement the way it's always presented.
This was an agreement that had clauses embedded into it that was not just offering Ukraine an economic association.
It was a military association.
It was, it was drawing Ukraine into European defense and NATO.
So, so this, this agreement that the Ukraine was signing...
Well, just to rewind for a second, this is, this is the agreement that when the government of the so-called Russia-leaning government in Kiev decided not to sign it, that's what started the protest movement that, that culminated in the regime change coup of 2014.
So this is the end of 2013 you're talking about.
Right.
So what the, what the West uses to trigger this, this American coup in the Ukraine, this Western coup in the Ukraine is Yanukovych in the Ukraine, who had said he would sign an economic agreement with the EU saying, wait, I need to put this on hold and think longer.
Because, because Russia's offering a better offer.
And by the way, Russia says, Putin says, no need to choose, right?
You can work with us and you can work with the union.
And it's America that says, no, you can't, you have to choose.
And the choice you have is a Russian economic offer where you're getting significantly more money, or an EU offer that not only is less money, but ties you into NATO.
And it does this in two ways.
One is that in 2009 at the EU conference in Lisbon, there's a treaty.
It's called the Treaty of Lisbon.
And it commits all new members of the European Union to aligning their defenses with NATO.
So if the Ukraine allies with the EU, they're allied with NATO.
And the economic agreement had several articles in it.
There was three or four articles in the economic agreement that the EU offered Ukraine that included language of security.
So it says one article said that the Ukraine would be deeply involved in European security area.
One says that there would be a convergence of security and defense between the EU and Ukraine.
And then there's an article that says that they'll explore the potential of military and technological cooperation.
So Russia's not facing a Ukraine on its border that's saying we're going to trade with Europe.
Russia's facing a Ukraine on its border that's saying we're NATO.
And, you know, Russia has a seaport in Crimea.
That seaport becomes NATO.
So you've got serious NATO encroachment on Russia.
And this is what Russia's responding to.
It's not like Russia has this general policy of expansionism.
It's that there's these isolated defensive responses to American expansionism.
And then when Russia defends against it, America cries, you know, Russian expansionism.
All right, guys.
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So, well, I think we more or less covered that.
There's more there.
Well, I do want to mention it.
I said before, there's twice in 10 years.
In 2004, they succeeded in overthrowing the same guy.
He won the election, and they did the Orange Revolution, Yanukovych.
And they put Yushchenko in there, and that didn't quite pan out.
And he ended up winning another election.
And the regime changed him again, and they used a bunch of Nazis to help do it, too.
And there's been fighting there ever since, right?
I mean there's been this horrible war in the East.
Right.
Talk about that for a minute, about what happened in 2014.
What do you mean what happened?
The reaction to the regime change in the East, and then the counter-reaction to that.
Well, you get, I mean, first of all, this is the latest in a series of what we're called colored wars.
And Russia has always seen the colored wars as American intervention, as a way of taking countries that are allied with Russia and bringing them into the Western sphere.
And then in 2014 in Ukraine, you get this catalyst of the European agreement that the West uses to undertake a coup in the Ukraine.
And Yanukovych is always presented as this Russian puppet that's flown in.
In fact, Yanukovych didn't get along with Putin very well at all.
He did take care of Russian nationals in Ukraine, so there was some policy alignment.
But he didn't get along well with Putin at all.
He was popularly elected by Ukrainians in a vote that was certified internationally as legit and transparent.
So this is a democratically elected guy that the Americans take out.
They install a government that's favorable to America.
The very first thing that government does when it's in is it puts in a request for an agreement with the European Union.
So you've got a Western coup.
As I said earlier, Putin does what he feels he has to do in bringing Crimea in that honors the referendum.
But he doesn't go on and try to take over Ukraine.
He doesn't take the Donbass.
So this is a response, a Russian response to a clear American coup.
There's recordings of Americans talking about, you know, that we need to midwife this coup, and who are we going to fly in, and this is the guy that we want, and the guy that they want is the guy they get.
It's a Western coup, right on Russia's border, right in the Ukraine, the heart of Russia.
And that's what Russia's responding to, and responding minimally, because they only respond to honor a referendum in the area that has the referendum.
And when other parts of Ukraine ask to come in, Russia says no.
So it's an isolated defensive response to American expansionism.
It's not Putin being expansionist trying to reconstitute a Soviet Union.
Yeah, well, and, you know, they were talking about, you know, Russia's going to invade the Baltics when – Yeah.
I mean, I don't think anybody but liars claims that.
And yet – but who's in the Baltics?
This is American and NATO forces led by Americans, just how many, what, 300, 400 miles from Moscow, right?
Yeah, and we're looking in the last two years at massive NATO military buildup in those countries.
I mean, and Hillary said – I remember when she was Secretary of State, she was saying, listen, we have got to take seriously the threat of the Russians right on NATO's doorstep.
Yeah.
Talking about the Russians moving their army on their side of the border inside Russia.
And, Scott, it's only NATO's doorstep because NATO moved 13 countries to the east.
NATO's doorstep was supposed to be Germany, right?
So, first of all, it's not even fair to call it NATO's doorstep.
That's only because of American expansionism.
And it's not Russia being aggressive in those countries.
It's, like I said, in the last, I think, two years or so, there's been massive NATO buildup in those countries.
You know, so this is – and Russia let this happen, right, until it hit Georgia and Ukraine.
I mean, this is not an aggressive Russia.
This is Russia watching the promise in Germany being broken.
It's watching NATO move 13 countries to the east, right up to Montenegro, I think, last year, 13 countries to the east.
And even when they do go into Georgia and Ukraine, Russia doesn't respond until Georgia starts bombing South Ossetia.
They don't respond until then.
And they don't respond in Ukraine until there's a coup.
And even then, their movement into Crimea is as far as they go.
They don't go farther, though Ukrainians are, you know, willing to let them go farther.
Well, and at least finally Obama chickened out and he sent them a bunch of trucks and stuff.
But he didn't send them tanks and guns and weapons like the Republicans were demanding.
And, in fact, Strobe Talbot was one of the guys who wrote this study demanding that Obama arm the Ukrainian government against Russian aggression.
You know, the same guy later.
And, in fact – I'm sorry, I've got to bring this up.
I'll never forget.
I heard on NPR it was the ambassador guy who had signed on to the same study was being interviewed on NPR News and said – and the guy asked him, well, so what's this going to accomplish then?
You know, if you escalate the war here and, you know, presuming that there are Russian regulars to be killed in this fight as they were doing in their argument.
And the guy said, well, we think if a bunch of Russians start getting killed in Ukraine, then that will cause the debate to go up in Russia.
And then that was it.
And then, like, you're just supposed to fill in the gap at the end of that, that, yes, the outraged mothers of the dead soldiers will demand that Putin bow down and give in to the Americans and stop letting people get killed there anymore.
Yeah, and, in fact – But he didn't even have the guts to say that part of it out loud.
It will cause the debate to go up.
Right.
And there was no debate.
Putin's popularity soared in Russia after Ukraine.
And I think the other thing that we didn't talk about, and it's a totally different subject, so I'll just mention it quickly.
I could not talk about it a lot, but this idea of Russian expansionism that we've been talking about now and I've been arguing isn't a policy of expansionism but isolated responses to American expansion.
If you look at American-Russian relations or Russia's approach to America when they don't perceive American expansionism, then what you usually see is Putin still trying to offer the same support he offered after 9-11.
So if you look at Syria, and Russia steps in and negotiates the treaty to get chemicals out of Syria, and you see Russia again acting as a partner to the West, or at least trying to act as a partner to the West.
So when they perceive America breaking international law and encroaching on countries they shouldn't encroach to, when their back's right up to their own borders, they defend themselves.
But when they don't perceive that aggression, then they're still trying to act as partners.
And by the way, I interrupted you earlier, like I am right now, but when you were about to talk about how Putin bent over backwards, in fact, I happen to know from reading something a rather long time ago, that he really had to face down a lot of right-wing militarists in the army and in the special whatever services there, and spies and what have you in Russia, that I have decided we are going to go along with George W. Bush in Afghanistan and help the Americans there.
This is our chance to do something to cooperate in an overt way with the Americans on their highest national security interests, and so that'll win us some good graces here, and this and that kind of thing, right?
Yeah, so he faces that down, and then he offers help after 9-11, and he offers help to such a degree, you know, that you get American officials saying that Putin's help after 9-11 was as significant as that of any NATO ally.
So here's Russia acting as an ally of America more than any other NATO ally, and America knows this, right?
This is America saying that Russia was like our greatest ally.
He was the first foreign leader to call that day, actually.
Yeah, and he offered significant intelligence and other kinds of help after 9-11, so the States knows he's acting, so here's the quote, as important as that of any NATO ally, and instead of taking that, Putin's attempt to, this is what I talked about earlier, this Richard Sakwa's idea of Russia trying to get a transformed Europe, where it's not a Cold War paradigm, but they're working as partners, and here's Putin saying, I'll be your partner.
We can work as friends.
We don't have to be enemies, so I'll help you as much as any NATO ally, and America's response to that was to immediately pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and announce that it would take Baltic states into NATO.
So Russia says we'll help you, and US has two responses.
One is return to the Cold War, the ABM Treaty, and the other is we'll take the Baltic states, so it's expansionism.
So when we accuse Russia of Cold War and expansionism, what we actually see is when Russia tries to put out a hand and end the Cold War, America rejects the hand and takes two moves that reinstate the Cold War and expands.
So who's the expansionist, and who's the country returning to NATO?
This is Putin really trying to change this, and it's America just slapping him down.
Well, and you know what?
If he's really that dastardly and evil, this KGB chess player, we ought to suspect why he's trying to lure us into the sand trap Vietnam of Afghanistan and fight a win-win war and bleed us to bankruptcy.
Right, and Russia's not going to be dumb enough to draw America into their Vietnam and Afghanistan, because Putin already recognized that America drew Russia into Afghanistan for their Vietnam.
So he's on to the strategy, and that's not going to happen again.
Well, they keep trying to accuse him of backing the Taliban now.
I'm worried that that lie is going to get too carried away.
So far, it's been debunked by the generals themselves repeatedly, but that may stop if they are ordered to stop debunking it.
Yeah, and Russia's always seen this as a common enemy, and they actually saw this as ground that they could work with America on to try to establish a partnership.
And it completely backfired on Putin's face.
I mean, like I said, their immediate response was canceling the ABM Treaty and taking Russian territory.
He really saw the Taliban as a common enemy.
He was worried about the same sort of extremism in his country, and he saw terrorism as an opportunity.
That's a bad way to say it, but he saw an opportunity in that situation to partner with America, and it totally backfired on him.
All right, well, so I guess I'll see you on vacation when we cash our checks from the Russian government for bribing us into saying these true things about what's really going on here.
I mean, it's funny because in this era where everybody is so falsely accused all the time of this kind of thing, and sometimes to a great effect.
I mean, they try to smear antiwar.com.
We don't give a damn, but there are some other people who have been real hurt by these kinds of accusations or whatever.
And yet, just on the face of it, it ain't like they won the Cold War, and they're the world empire, and they're the ones who invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, and Yemen, and Libya, and Syria.
Libya, Syria.
Yeah.
Mali.
Libya and Syria, really.
And now in Nigeria, and Niger, and whatever.
But yeah, no, America is the world empire.
America is the aggressor.
And then, as you say, it just rolls right off your tongue.
It's not like, I don't know if you've got a PhD in this stuff, but you don't need one.
Apparently, you've been keeping track of the news lately.
And it's obvious that all of the very worst things that the Russians have done, such as sending little green men to the Donbass region to help them defend themselves, really, from attack by the Kiev regime, backed by America there, for example.
Or killing civilians in their bombings of American-backed terrorists in Syria, and these kinds of things, as horrible as they are, are all directly reactions to American policies, where they're deliberately and directly crossing Russian red lines.
You know, the Iron Monroe doctrine applies to the whole world, and no other country can have one at all.
And, you know, come on.
I mean, just on the face of it, this is obviously all America's fault.
Give me a break.
You're supposed to be so scared of this country that has the GDP of Wisconsin or something.
Yeah.
When Russia did draw that sort of red line around, you know, Georgia and Ukraine, you don't talk about the Monroe doctrine, but America completely refused to recognize that Russia had any sort of sphere of influence or any sort of interest in having an area around it that was a border between NATO encroachment and Russia.
The doctrine was just that we can go as far east as we want to go.
Well, but now, so I don't know.
Mad Dog Mattis is going to say a wise thing, and so Trump won't go that far.
I mean, he did already, as we talked about, send guns there, as Obama wouldn't, and he's allowed Montenegro to join NATO.
He never said he wanted out of NATO or anything like that.
He just wanted the Germans to buy more weapons and this kind of thing was his only real NATO complaint.
As much panic as it caused in the establishment and hope as it inspired in the anti-war right really was nothing but that.
But I guess, do you want to call a prediction here?
Is it obvious enough that if they announce that they really intend to bring Ukraine into NATO, that the Russians will simply invade and march straight to Kiev and say no?
So, I'm not enough of an expert on this, but the experts that I'm reading, what they seem to be saying is that Ukraine is going to make a serious pitch for NATO, but they're saying it's not going to happen anytime soon at all.
Not so much because America will stop it, but because the European members of NATO are going to stop it.
So, I don't have a prediction, but the reading, the stuff I'm seeing, the experts are saying it's not going to happen anytime soon.
Well, and you know, they really do have a will of their own there, right?
In 2000, was it 16?
It may have even been 15, when Merkel and Holland from France came to D.C. and informed Obama, we are going to go and end this war and negotiate, and they did the Minsk II agreement there.
Yep.
Sorry about that.
Alright, so listen man, it's great stuff.
It's really important work, and it's the spotlight today on AntiWar.com, everybody.
Accusing Russia, listening to history.
Thanks very much, Ted.
Thanks Scott, it was great talking to you.
Ted Snyder, you guys.
And you know me, ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, FoolsAaron.us for my book, and the audio book is now available too on Audible and Amazon and all of that.
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Alright then.
Thank you.
