I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, this one goes out to my wife, Larissa Alexandrovna Horton.
This is our 10-year anniversary, and so this one's for you, lady, and it just so happens we're going to be talking about your home country, Ukraine.
It's the great Doug Bondo from the Cato Institute, senior fellow there, and regular contributor at Antiwar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show.
Doug, how you doing?
I always happen to be on, doing okay.
Great to have you here.
I really agree with your piece about how Ukraine should not be an official ally of the United States of America.
You want to talk about that a little bit?
Oh, sure.
I mean, Ukraine's a perfectly fine place to visit.
I've been there.
I've talked to people, but the question is when the U.S. should be prepared to go to war and especially prepared to go to war with a nuclear-armed adversary, namely Russia, and Ukraine has never been an American security interest.
It isn't an American security interest today.
It makes no sense to jump into that kind of potential conflict where you are actually risking the American society, that if you get into war with the Russians, it could go very badly very quickly.
Yeah.
Now, so how involved is America in Ukraine anyway, Doug?
Well, the U.S. is giving military aid, and as we put it, lethal military aid, that is military aid that they can use in a war, anti-tank missiles, that kind of a thing.
So we're there, and we've been very politically supportive.
We have promised Ukraine membership into NATO, even though we want them to make some changes in their own country.
Before that, we have made the promise.
Everybody knows that.
They're pushing us very hard on that.
So we're intimately involved, and the Europeans are as well, and we treat them almost as an ally, though not exactly like an ally, which makes it a bit confusing, and that's also dangerous.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, so talk about that, treating them as an ally and not an ally.
We've had this problem before, right, with Georgia comes to mind, which is also relevant to this exact same discussion back in 2008, where apparently their leader, Mikhail Shakhashvili, thought he had at least a flashing yellow light type of a thing, maybe a green light from the Bush government to attack South Ossetia.
And then it turned out that, yeah, no, he didn't, or at least he didn't have a promise of support anyway.
Well, there certainly were a lot of Georgians who expected that the U.S. would stand by them.
You know, after the Russians attacked and we didn't show up there, there were articles quoting Russian citizens asking where America was.
There's a cabinet member who testified that Shakhashvili thought that we would support him if the Russians went after us.
So it shows the danger that if you go there, Bush shows up, he calls him an ally, we promise him UN membership.
You know, they sent some troops to fight in Afghanistan to show how loyal they were to America.
That's one of the problems of alliances, is which you create this presumption on the part of your supposed friends, where they expect things that you never thought you were going to have to deliver.
You know, and then you're stuck where either you're kind of faithless with them or you get yourself into a war you didn't plan on.
Thankfully, in that case, we didn't get involved, though it apparently went to the Bush cabinet.
They debated whether we should bomb the tunnels through which the Russians were sending their troops.
I mean, that would have been utter madness, but it went to the cabinet.
It shows how seriously they took it.
Right.
Yeah.
And in fact, it was reported in two different places.
Almost certain one of them was Ron Susskind, who is a little bit suspect.
I don't know.
He got a lot of things right.
And I'm sorry, I forget who the other one was.
They both said that, yeah, it was Cheney was pushing for that, the vice president.
And that by then, thank God, George W. Bush was over listening to this guy, you know, and turned him down.
But yeah, as you say, that was the discussion in the principals committee there.
Are we going to attack the Russians for defending their peacekeepers who are occupying this territory that they used to rule and that the EU brokered the deal that has them there then when our guy attacked them?
I mean, yeah, pretty wild stuff.
So and that getting back to Ukraine, then we have the question of the president there saying essentially that he had a promise that America is going to bring Ukraine into NATO and got himself rebuked immediately by, I think, Blinken, the secretary of state.
And then the president himself said, no, that's not true.
Right.
In just the last couple of weeks.
Yeah.
What he did is he tweeted.
He said he thanked NATO, you know, because they essentially guaranteed that they would become part of the alliance.
And that was enough to force Biden to say, oh, no, no, no, no.
There are conditions.
You have to meet all these conditions first, especially on corruption, which, you know, that's going to be very difficult because the place is very highly corrupt.
Now, he clearly overstepped.
Even some of the folks who think that they should be part of NATO admit that he really blew it that, you know, because what he did is he managed to get the US to come down and say no.
You know, while if he'd simply shut up, there would have been no official presidential no.
But to have the US make that very clear, clearly set them back.
So from our standpoint, that was good.
Yeah.
It was overreach that forced the administration to say certainly not now.
I mean, they'd be absolutely crazy.
And I know that they're very arrogant and very kind of self-deluded a lot of times.
But the reality of Russian H-bombs is something that just cannot be ignored, right?
But most most of the kind of hawkish folks will say, of course, we cannot go to war over Ukraine.
I mean, you really do find that that's pretty common, that there is an understanding that and you could never sell this to the American people.
I mean, try to imagine explaining why we're going to war for Ukraine.
I mean, Americans would, I think, go absolutely nuts.
So, you know, guess what?
You know, nuclear bombs might be falling because we want to make sure that Kiev, you know, I mean, so that it's one of those things.
It's kind of like Georgia.
Again, they make assumptions which Americans have no intention at all of following up.
It encourages them to be much more aggressive, for example, you know, not fulfilling the Minsk agreement, which had the Ukrainians agreeing to constitutional federalism for the Donbass.
You know, they've simply refused.
Well, as long as they refuse, the Russians have no reason to go on their side of the agreement.
You know, so, you know, but they're doing that because they assume they're going to be supported by the U.S.
Speaking of which, you know, it was the French and the Germans who insisted on making that deal.
And Obama, I guess, said, OK, go ahead.
And then which, by the way, I was looking at antiwar.com this morning.
There's reports of two fighters on the secessionist side who were killed there.
So the fighting does continue.
But it was also the French and the Germans who said no way on NATO membership for Ukraine, I think, back during W. Bush.
Right.
Or was it during Obama?
I mean, it was focused on Bush because 2008 at the UN conference, then the NATO conference then is when they got the agreement.
They could come in.
But the Europeans made very clear, oh, well, that's very much down the road.
None of them want to have them in.
Yeah.
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So do you think if the Americans would just back off of this issue, I mean we're talking about Joe Biden, who Victoria Nuland in the leaked phone call says was involved in the plot to overthrow the government there in February 2014 and everything he's, you know, that's sort of the origin of the whole scandal of his son was that the government that they overthrew was really tight with this company, Brisma, and they were worried that they were going to get thrown under the bus under the new regime.
So they hired the vice president's son as a bit of insurance there because they'd been friends with the last guy.
So I know that Biden personally, you know, as they say, he held the Ukraine brief in the Obama government.
I think that's even official as they say it there.
You know, he was put in charge of Ukraine policy.
So there's a major interest of his for good or for ill.
But I guess what I'm trying to get to is if he would just for whatever reason back off, you think the French and the Germans would find a way to come to a real final agreement with the Russians and the Ukrainians on the future of the east and the end of the war there?
Well, to me, the critical question is the Russians, that is, if you could get them to agree, you know, if we promise you we agree, we set in motion the idea that Ukraine and Georgia will never be part of NATO, would you back off of Donbass?
To me, that's the essential issue.
I mean, I think the Russians can live with the Ukraine that does a lot of business with the West.
I think the I think the West can live with the idea that Crimea is not going to be given up.
I mean, we might still sanction anything on that territory, but that wouldn't necessarily involve anything else with Russia.
So to me, if you could get the Russians to back off of supporting separatists in Donbass, you know, then I think you have a potential settlement.
And it strikes me that the way to do that is to tell them, don't worry, we don't plan on bringing Ukraine in.
We're not going to kind of threaten you.
And then the Ukrainians can do what they want.
I mean, Ukrainians might not be happy with that, but what we simply tell them is, look, you guys do whatever you want, but we're not we're simply not going to defend you.
So live with that world.
Then I think the Ukrainians have an incentive to make a deal with the Russians.
You know, and the Russians don't expect to run Ukraine, but the Russians want to make sure their interests are protected.
So I think it can work out.
It's kind of an informal thing.
I mean, we all we all kind of know the position we have to take and everybody else can live with it, even if it's not their first choice.
Well, of course, any deal between Kiev and Moscow would have to be that they would stop their attacks on the east if the Russians are going to stop supporting the secessionists that I think probably would imply to pressure on them to settle for federalism.
But that would mean a meaningful agreement from Kiev that they would really respect enhanced autonomy for the Donbass rather than, as you put it before, simply ignoring the agreement that they made at Minsk to and continuing the pressure this whole time.
I think you're absolutely right that if all of them realize that the only way to get this settled is to make an agreement and live with it, then I think there's a much better chance at the moment.
The problem is Ukrainians want the West to save them and they get enough support in the West where they get all the rhetoric and potential promises of aid and whatnot in hope of getting a NATO.
They're not willing to make that deal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's funny.
It just seems like I know it's my bias and all of that, but just pretty sure it's why it's my bias is because it keeps getting confirmed that America is the root of all of the problem here.
If they would just back off, it gives everybody else an enhanced incentive to figure out another way forward.
But with the 800 pound guerrilla potentially being at service of Kiev at any given point to whatever degree is maybe up in the air at any given time, but still that is what skews everything.
And the Russians, they already proved that they don't want the East.
Right.
When the when the Donbass voted in a referendum to join Russia, Putin told them no.
And that was right when his guys, he had all his special operations guys on the ground.
They could have gone ahead and taken it.
No, that's right.
I mean, I remember at the time people were telling me that they expected Russia's going to invade, it's going to conquer all of Ukraine, and I thought they were nuts because you're not going to be able to swallow Ukraine.
And Ukraine continue to fight the Soviets after the Nazis were kicked out.
There is a there is an independence movement that fought for years.
The I mean, Ukraine has on the eastern section is much more pro-Russian, but the western section is much less so.
It came from Austria.
It's Galicia, much more Catholic that I thought that they're insane, that Putin is not no fool.
Putin has limited objectives.
And one of them was that from his standpoint, the best way to keep Ukraine out of NATO is to keep a conflict going on that, you know, because you're not supposed to bring countries into NATO that, you know, have ongoing conflicts with their neighbors.
So we created an incentive for the Russians to create trouble because the only way they can be sure it wouldn't come into NATO is by making sure there is a continuing conflict.
Yeah.
So now Ray McGovern makes a lot of the fact that William Burns is the head of the CIA right now.
And I don't know everything about this guy, but Ray likes to point out that he's the guy that wrote and it's in the WikiLeaks, thanks to Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who's rotting to death in solitary confinement in the UK right now.
But it's in there that William Burns met with Sergei Lavrov and the title of the State Department cable is Nyet Means Nyet.
And it's Sergei Lavrov saying, listen, hear me when I say you can't bring Ukraine into NATO.
We won't accept that.
Read me.
All right, great.
Good talk.
And so then apparently William Burns, you know, faithfully, as McGovern emphasizes, faithfully wrote this up that, yes, Sergei Lavrov said a thing to me and he sure seemed like he meant it at the time.
So we should pay attention to this, that, you know, they have their red lines, no matter how much more powerful our military is in a conventional way or, you know, on a conventional basis or what.
They'll fight before they let us take Ukraine seems to be, you know, their solid position.
But so then.
Does it matter, do you think, that this guy Burns is part of the principals committee and can talk about this?
He is, right?
CIA is part of the principals committee.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, the CIA is going to be consulted in anything they do.
My sense is that no one in the U.S. government wants to fight.
And I think that's one reason why with Bush out of office, I mean, the problem for the U.S. is it hesitates reversing a promise already made.
It's much easier to simply say conditions have not been met.
I mean, that's what Biden basically said.
Right.
Well, you've got the corruption problem, you know, and this and that these things have to be met, you know, because basically, you know, who believes that Ukraine is going to solve the corruption problem anytime soon?
So it's simply the easy way out of this is to say, well, of course we have the same promise.
They just haven't met the conditions.
And you just keep saying that and you assume you can get away with it.
I mean, there are obvious dangers with that.
I mean, acting as if you can get away with it.
But I think that's a lot of what we see going on is after the Bush administration, I mean, nobody was enthused about going accepting this commitment.
I mean, they'd all watched and seen what had happened.
They realized that Russia has local conventional superiority.
Look at a map.
How do you want to try to defend them?
And you realize that, you know, they can go to nukes and the Russians have a very competent force.
They've spent money well.
I mean, their conventional forces are good.
I mean, they're much improved over 2008 when they fought the Georgians.
They've got nukes that can match ours.
And if you know this is a vital interest to them.
Oh, my.
I mean, so I think that's that's recognized.
But I think Burns Burns will certainly be part of the process.
I mean, you're not he's a well-respected diplomat and the CIA.
Everybody will bring into decision making.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's a hell of a note that the route for the director of the CIA to be the cool headed voice, you know, in the room or whatever.
But I guess that's where we're stuck.
Or I don't know.
You know, what's interesting was Gilbert Doctorow, who writes for us at antiwar.com from time to time and who's, you know, a real Russia expert, an American Russia expert.
He talked about how Blinken's stepfather, who it turned out is tied to Ghislaine Maxwell's father, the guy that fell off the yacht and all this.
Anyway, yeah, the same guy was apparently a real big voice for moderation and cool headedness during the Cold War with the USSR and right at a time when he was raising young Antony Blinken.
And so that Blinken must be, you know, thoroughly steeped in all of this stuff, right?
And must have, you know, nuanced understandings in ways that have to equate to more reasonableness as compared to just having a John Bolton up there or something who knows nothing but thinks he knows everything.
Right, right.
Well, the fact that, you know, Biden has stood firm on wanting to get back into the JCPOA, despite the pressure even within his own party, I mean, I do think shows us and the fact, you know, at least says at the moment we are proceeding out of Afghanistan, I mean, does tell me that, you know, he has some independent thoughts there and he's willing to take on the war lobby, you know, even though, you know, I mean, he's he's bad on some other stuff, obviously, that I think there's at least some hope with him compared to a lot of these folks that we've had in.
And yeah, again, it sucks, we got to settle for the Biden people, but it could be worse.
I mean, I think some of them may have learned something from the first experience.
I mean, we are still dealing with Libya.
Thank you guys very much.
We're still dealing with Syria.
Thank you guys very much.
We're still dealing with Afghanistan.
Boy, you guys were really successful.
I mean, I think there may be an element of that where they all recognize they've had all these problems are still there.
Yeah, that and some of them may realize that maybe they didn't help things very much back when they were dealing with it.
And at least they don't have that Mike Pompeo, you know, macho B.S. because they're all a bunch of weenies and they know it that and they could that could backfire.
Right.
They could be, oh, we got to do something muscular.
Right.
But there's also something to them knowing that they're really not the fighting type and maybe they need to figure out another way to proceed.
Exactly.
I do think that that that isn't really them.
Yes.
So so we may be spared that.
Yeah.
All right.
So now what do you make of all these exercises?
We got this guy, Rick Rosoff, Rosoff, Rosoff, Rosoff, who's been writing for us at antiwar.com and has just been doing this thorough job of covering all of the bomber missions and all of the missions up into the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea and the Sea of Oshkosh out there in the east.
I don't know if they're sailing in there, but they're definitely doing bomber flights, testing Russian radars and all this stuff.
Giant NATO training exercises with the, you know, many of the European member states and all of this stuff, they just buying Lockheed products and doing business like always.
Or is this really a thing going on here where they're strategically speaking, they really do have an entire new kind of structural bent toward how they approach Russia?
Oh, I think that.
It's primarily we're sending a message, we have to prove we're tough, we, you know, let the let the Europeans know we're behind them.
It's something they can tell the kind of Ukraine.
Oh, yeah.
We may not be bringing you to NATO, but don't worry, we're doing all this other kind of stuff.
So my guess is it's primarily symbolic, though one never knows for sure.
But again, I don't think there's much interest in actually going to war with Russia.
I mean, I just don't think most of the people I've seen writing about this all acknowledge that.
I mean, the U.S. could lose.
I mean, we know if we want to really, really go to war and the Europeans are with us, we would win.
But everybody understands that this would be catastrophic.
And to try to do anything in the east without nuclear weapons would be very hard.
And the moment you get to nuclear weapons, they have them, too.
And then the world ends.
So I think a lot of this is play acting and part of it may be directed at Congress so they can tell Congress, you know, don't worry, we're being tough.
That's where a lot of the pressure comes for doing stupid things.
Yeah.
You know, when Oliver Stone interviewed Putin, he says, listen, you know, all this anti-missile stuff is just a boondoggle and they're just taxing the American people because they like to, you know, and Putin says, I'm really glad he brought that up because I don't know if Putin's thought about that or not, you know, and then Putin says, yeah, no, I know that's right.
Of course, it's all a big rip off of the American people.
We all know that.
However, look at the position you're putting me in here, man.
You know, can't just ring my country with anti-missile missiles without me having to escalate on the other side because it is what it is.
You know, I can't let you get away with, you know, destroying my retaliatory capability, man.
You understand that.
And so I'm glad to know that he understands the economics of the military industrial complex in America and how they could just be, as you say, play acting for all of their other incentives that aren't really focused on him, where he's just sort of the pretended, you know, focus point of it all.
I mean, I read a thing somehow.
I ended up reading a thing by Ross Douthat in The New York Times, if I'm saying that right, about how, ah, look who's not so upset about Vladimir Putin anymore, the Democrats.
And he doesn't do a good enough job of saying thank God for that.
But he's just pointing out that Biden took essentially a pretty conciliatory approach to dealing with Putin at the recent summit here and on quite a few issues and including making it clear to the Ukrainians that they're not joining NATO anytime soon.
And instead of being, you know, dragged for high treason on CNN, this is just wise statesmanship.
So that's, you know, I'm not giving them credit for it.
It's their horrible partisanship at play.
But at least, you know, it's an important silver lining for us.
Yep, yep.
But anyway, I'm sorry, I just remembered that Ed said that you had to go early today, so I'll let you go.
Thank you for your time, Doug.
Really appreciate it.
Take care now.
Have a good one.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APS Radio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
