06/05/15 – James Carden – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our guest today is James Carden.
He's a contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine and also writes for the national interest.
Gary has a piece for the liberal Nation Magazine, Neo-McCarthyism, and the U.S. Media.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, James?
I'm well.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Lots of important stuff to talk about.
First and foremost, I'd like to give you a chance to tell us about this new organization that you have apparently helped to found here, the American Committee for East-West Accord.
What's that?
Well, it's new, but it has a very distinguished predecessor.
The old American Committee on East-West Accord was a Cold War pro-detente organization made up of illustrious Americans who were taking a stand against the more hardline crowd centered around the old Committee for the Present Danger.
Now the old committee was made up of people like George F. Kennan, former Undersecretary of State George W. Ball, Hodding Carter from the Johnson administration, former Senator George McGovern, and others.
So today we thought that given the one-sided nature of the debate over U.S.-Russia policy that has been occurring since the start of the Ukraine crisis, it was perhaps appropriate to revisit this committee and get more pro-detente, pro-dialogue voices out there aside from the usual neocon militarists who have dominated the debate over the past 18 months.
You know, I'm curious about how different the debate is, James, compared to then.
I mean, I remember watching, say, I don't know, Crossfire or whatever with my dad in the 80s when I was a little kid, and it seemed like at least there was a longer period of time between commercials and the discussion was just seemingly on the surface more serious.
It was almost like, well, you know, we lied to you all week long, but on Sunday morning the discussion is based on a little bit more reality kind of thing.
But it doesn't seem like that anymore to me, but that may have just been because I was a little kid and it all seemed more on the up and up and I didn't understand.
In other words, in the 70s, did reasonable voices have a much more prominent voice than they have now?
Was it any easier to push back against the echo chamber of the crazies?
Yeah, I think it was.
I think that if you, one can easily look up the membership of the old committee on East West Accord and see that the members of that committee came from a representative broad spectrum of American political thinking.
You had Avril Harriman, who was the former governor of New York and the former ambassador to the USSR, standing alongside Theodore Hesburgh, who was the president of Notre Dame.
These voices, these pro detente voices were very much in the mainstream.
There are some similarities, I think, to the debate then, debate now, especially in terms of the tactics that neoconservatives use.
I'll give you an example that I came across that I find by turns amusing and disturbing.
The old committee on the present danger, this neoconservative organization that I've been speaking about, issued this in 1977.
See if this sounds familiar.
The Soviet military buildup of all its armed forces over the past quarter century is in part reminiscent of Nazi Germany's rearmament in the 1930s.
Well, this is very similar to the parallels that are made almost without surcease between Vladimir Putin's Russia and Nazi Germany.
And so, you know, I think that one of the differences between the debate now and the debate then, though, is that the hardline anti anti-Russian, pro-militarist crowd has very quickly, very quickly descends into ad hominem.
And that was part of the focus of the Nation article that you mentioned earlier.
Right, because, you know, I don't know, I guess, well, it's easier than engaging in an actual argument.
We're basically dealing with the surge worked level nonsense when it comes to the rise of Putin's imperialist Russia here.
It's what Robert Higgs calls truncating the antecedents.
All you need to know is that Putin may have given some guns and some money to some rebels in eastern Ukraine.
That monster.
It's just like that time that Hitler moved into Czechoslovakia.
It doesn't matter that it's nonsense.
It's just as long as you got, you know, at least five or six different editorial pages pushing the same narrative.
It passes for wisdom, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, it's conventional.
It's wise.
That's exactly right.
I mean, what the there's basically been this extraordinary conflation between the right, the traditional rights, neoconservatism and the Democratic Party's liberal interventionists.
They're basically that those philosophies are now basically one in the same.
And so what many of the pundits and even government officials do is rather than debate on the merits, what they do is they'll say, well, the position that you're taking, right, on, say, NATO expansion.
Well, people on RT say the same thing.
Therefore, you must be a Putin apologist and we're not going to engage you on the issues.
We're just going to say that you're disqualified from the conversation because what you're saying also happens to be what they're saying on Russian state media.
That's a very clever way to circumvent a debate, but it's very it is noxious and it is reminiscent of the worst aspects of the McCarthy era.
Yeah, that's the whole other thing is it's just not true.
And, you know, I was just reminded the other day about when George Kennan spoke to Tom Friedman in 1998 of The New York Times there about NATO expansion.
He was basically screaming at the top of his lungs as far as that kind of thing goes, saying, don't do this, that, you know, you claim that this is perfectly benign and there's no way the Russians will see this as some kind of threat.
But, yes, they will, too.
And there's no reason to do this.
And we're doing it to the guys who overthrew the communists for us.
So what the hell are we doing here?
Stop.
And they did it anyway.
They did it anyway.
And then Kennan predicted what would happen afterwards.
He said that, you know, Russia would react and then the proponents of the policy would claim that because the Russians have reacted, that it vindicates their expansionist policy.
And so, you know, it just goes round and round.
It, you know, it's striking to me.
And I think that it's one of the reasons why reforming the committee is so timely is because voices like Kennan's have been have been marginalized.
And so I think it's extremely important, given what's going on in eastern Ukraine right now, where the fighting seems to be on the verge of, you know, a new a new conflagration over there.
I think it's extraordinarily important.
Right.
And by the way, for people not familiar, Kennan was one of the creators of the Cold War doctrine in the first place at the dawn of the Cold War after World War Two.
So he is no slouch when it came to opining on these issues.
I'm sorry.
We'll be right back on the other side of this break with James Carden from the American Conservative and the National Interest in just a minute.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with James Carden.
He is from the American Committee for East West Accord, the brand new group he's putting together as many heavy hitters as he can to plead for a little bit of sanity, at least some realism in the discussion about what the policy is, what the facts are in Eastern Europe right now and what can be done to keep the peace here.
How how are we ever going to get things right if we don't even have the facts straight?
Now, and so here's the thing.
It's very important, I think, James, that you write for the national interest, which is different from what you heard during the commercial, folks.
The Council for the National Interest Foundation is a separate organization, even though their names are somewhat similar.
But anyway, so you write for them, you write for the American Conservative magazine.
And it's very important, even though communism has been dead in Russia for 25 years, it's very important still that you come from the right and you make a conservative argument rather than something that can be spun as just some kind of liberal nation magazine, Michael Moore, give peace a chance, naive and not tough enough.
You know, like they say about Obama, no matter how many people he kills, not tough enough to stand up against the vile Vladimir Putin, that kind of thing.
So it seems extremely important to me that you are a part of this from the very beginning and that you continue to bring on as many conservatives as you have.
Jack Matlock, George H.W. Bush's second to last ambassador to the Soviet Union as a member as well.
And I would just hope that you continue to focus on bringing as many prominent conservatives on as you can, even if Henry Kissinger has some reasonable things to say about Russia these days, which, you know, I don't know if you want to associate yourself with him.
But but anyway, you see my what the drift I'm coming from here, because because, as you're saying, the narrative is dominated by, you know, basically a bunch of David Frummey and name calling.
And there's there's no real engagement with the other side of the debate, which is as simple as, hey, let's just rewind the facts a couple of years, look at the overall policy and how we got into this mess instead of starting with the taking of Crimea last spring.
Yes, that's true.
I'm very happy to be serving as the editor, but it's very much the brainchild of the founding board.
It's and it's a very distinguished bipartisan group in keeping with the drift in the tradition of the of the older committee.
So we have regular contributors to the nation like Professor Cohen.
I'm a pretty frequent contributor to the nation myself.
And former Democratic senator and presidential candidate Bill Bradley is on the committee.
And we have distinguished businessmen like Gilbert Doctorow and former Disney chairman and Proctor and Gamble chairman John Pepper.
So it's a group with, you know, distinguished businessmen, intellectuals and the occasional hack journalist like myself.
Well, now, is part of the plan to bring on as many prominent people as you can who are willing to stick their neck out and speak reasonably on this issue?
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
We're just going to let the word go forth.
Yes.
Yeah.
No, I mean, this is come on.
This is scientifically it's not even a matter of opinion.
It's a mathematical fact that this is the most important thing in the whole wide world.
America's relationship with Russia.
We got thousands of H-bombs, thousands of them.
So we just can't have this.
We just can't have it.
Simple as that.
I think that, you know, letting that having the neocons take over U.S.-Russia policy is an enormous mistake and poses an enormous danger to the country.
I mean, there is no national security issue that involves the United States that doesn't have some bearing on U.S.-Russian relations.
And that goes for the continuing operations in Afghanistan.
It goes for the problem of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East.
It goes for the tricky problem of what to do with North Korea and never mind the security situation in Europe.
And it even extends to outer space.
After all, we are using or have been using Russian rockets, and we have been cooperating with them on the space station for many years now.
So it's an extraordinarily important relationship, too important, I would say, to leave to the crowd of warmongers who inhabit many or most of the think tanks and political journals in this country.
Well, now, it seems, you know, like important maybe that back then when Kenan and the guys created the Cold War, they said, listen, this isn't just that Russia has a tremendously sized sphere of influence, that they're dominating all of Eastern Europe the way that they are.
But it's that it's backed by this insane, murderous, communistic ideology that's hell bent on world domination.
And therefore, we got to contain them.
We absolutely must wage this Cold War against them, even roll them back, argued the others, et cetera, regime change them.
But so now we're talking about whether they're allowed to have their sphere of influence in, you know, right there.
I mean, we already have the Baltic states as members of NATO.
And now, obviously, as far as my best understanding, as far as any other foreign nation on the planet, Ukraine is the one that is most important to Russia, that it stay in their so-called orbit and doesn't go piling around with the likes of NATO, the opposition military alliance.
Am I reading that right?
Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a certain irony in our current position.
You have back then it was the USSR that had a kind of universal, universalist ideology.
We know that we know all what that was.
Russia today doesn't have a universalizing ideology, but we do.
And it's called democratic peace theory.
And it's this idea that we should be going around interfering with the internal affairs of other countries and remaking their governments in the image of Iran.
And we do that as Max Boot, the prominent neoconservative, has written.
We should do that at gunpoint, if need be.
So, you know, this idea, this, you know, crusading mentality used to belong to the Soviet Union and now belongs to us.
And, you know, I find it very puzzling that there are numerous American commentators who now seem to have discovered Ukraine.
And now suddenly Ukraine is as important to us as it is to Russia.
Well, that's completely ludicrous.
The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written that there's no there is no future.
There is no European future without Ukraine.
Well, that's a preposterous thing to say, especially given the fact that I think only 18 percent of Americans can find Ukraine on a map.
So, you know, you're exactly right.
This is an extremely fraught moment.
And our pretending that Ukraine means as much to us as it does to Russia, never mind to the people in eastern Ukraine, is ludicrous.
All right.
Well, so now maybe I should try to contradict and check my own confirmation bias here.
I mean, I understand very well.
I believe I think I do the role of America leading up to, you know, creating the crisis in the European Union, our allies creating the crisis in Ukraine that led to the coup d'etat, which they supported.
And, you know, much of America's intervention, how it led to this beyond just NATO expansion in general, but leading up to the current crisis and the war going on in Ukraine right now.
But in a sense, you know, hey, that kind is beside the point of whether Putin is a reborn czar who's determined to move his border as far west as he possibly can.
Maybe he does, despite the fact that America obviously picked this fight.
We have Newland's leaked phone call and all of this.
What exactly, sir, do you know about Russia?
And and are you sure that you're not being naive, that I'm not being naive about the intentions of this vicious right wing nationalist government that they have there or communistic one or whatever we're supposed to call it to be afraid of it?
Are you sure that it's all just propaganda here?
That's that's got everybody set on edge?
Well, in a sense, in a sense, I am, because if you look at what the United States and NATO have been up to for the past 25 years, a very easy way to figure out what the Russians are thinking is just simply walk in their shoes for a moment and think back what is what has gone on from 1994 to 2014.
And there's been the very steady, slow march of NATO installations and countries joining NATO surrounding Russia.
And the United States has made a concerted effort to gather up the former members of the Soviet Union and place them into into our camp.
And so it would look very different, I think, if Russia was Russia, let's say Russia and China decided to start installing member countries in, you know, Latin America, for instance, into the Shanghai security organization.
That would look, I think, rather threatening from from our shores.
So I think that what explains Mr. Putin's stance in Ukraine has to do with it being he is a almost defensive, it's a defensive operation.
We hear these things all the time in the American press that if we don't stop him in Eastern Ukraine, he's going to roll on into the Baltics, he's going to roll on through into Poland, etc.
That really makes very little sense.
And I think that there's absolutely very little to believe that.
The reason that the war began in Ukraine has to do with the fact that Ukraine was going to join the EU.
And then when a country joins the EU, almost inevitably, what follows is that it joins NATO.
In fact, there are specific security and foreign policy protocols embedded within the European Union Association Agreement that paved the way for NATO membership.
So Russia, in a sense, was acting initially, was reacting in a defensive, not offensive manner.
Now, does this excuse the fact that they are funding the rebellion and sending troops into the sovereign territory of Ukraine?
It does not.
But it's understandable.
And I think that there's been a big, there's a big difference between explaining Russian behavior and excusing Russian behavior.
But we have to try to understand where they're coming from, because the relationship is so important.
And then we need to ask ourselves, is, are we going to commit U.S. blood and treasure over the Donbas?
I find it very difficult to believe.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, there's the double standard where America can back even Mujahideen rebels in Syria in the name of humanitarianism because of the war against them, which is really, you know, their war against the government, really, but whatever you call it.
So I'm not sure it's altogether clear that it's morally wrong.
I don't know about international law, where if the coup d'etat government in Kiev is determined to obliterate the people.
I mean, this was the excuse for the war against Libya, right, was, well, we got to protect the people in the east from getting killed.
Yeah, it's like burning.
It's like, you know, burning the village down to save it.
You know, the government that we are in bed with, this junta regime in Kiev is enacting and has been enacting now for a year, almost a year now.
No, I'm sorry, about 13 months now, a so-called anti-terrorist operation against their own people.
And I think that says a lot.
And I've been to the Donbass.
I went in late March.
And the ordinary people there simply are in a state of disbelief that their own countrymen now view them as little more than terrorists.
And so Kiev has done a horrific job in trying to keep the country together.
In fact, you know, the way that they've gone about dealing with the rebellion has done nothing except exasperate the situation.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry.
Is there any way I can keep you for one more question?
We're already over time here, and I don't want to cut in on your plans.
OK, so I wonder if you think then that this is the end of Minsk, too, which apparently, you know, had more teeth than it was working a little better than Minsk one.
There's been some fighting, but now it's sort of never mind the propaganda about, oh, the Russians are preparing for a full scale invasion.
But I wonder whether Kiev is.
And I wonder whether you think, you know, Americans over there training are going to be caught in a tripwire or something like that, possibly.
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the great dangers of sending American trainers.
We recall the sending of American trainers very well in the previous war, right?
In Southeast Asia, it began with a couple of hundred so-called advisors and trainers and then quickly spun out of control.
So is this the end of Minsk, too?
It's quite possible.
Minsk, too, has been hanging by a thread.
When I was in Donetsk in late March, the fighting around the airport continued, you know, the entire time I was there.
There have been parts of the Donbass where the fighting really has never stopped.
Part of the blame for this, and this never really gets mentioned, is that Minsk, too, required the government in Kiev to speak, to negotiate with the rebels and their representatives in the Donbass, in the two self-proclaimed People's Republics, the one in Luhansk and the one in Donetsk.
And they refused to do so.
And so that in itself is a violation of the Minsk Accords.
And so if you're not willing to sit down and negotiate with these people, then war will come and people will say, well, why should they negotiate with terrorists?
Well, it happens all the time.
We wouldn't have peace in Northern Iraq if people didn't sit down with IRA and Xi Jinping.
So, you know, we can't have this sort of, you know, utopian idea where we live in this world where we never negotiate, we never deal with terror.
Should our priority be to stop the fighting and stop the human suffering, which is immense in Eastern Ukraine?
We're not.
And I think that Kiev has made their choice.
And I think the choice that they have made is to continue the anti-terrorist operation.
So they have chosen war.
And Russia will respond.
Yeah.
And then, like you said earlier, quote in canon or paraphrasing canon, then they'll say, see, we told you 15 times that Russia was going to invade and it finally came true.
That's right.
Well, now clock is right twice a day, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So but now when Obama sends the trucks and sends the troops over there to train these guys, is that just politics?
Because, geez, I got to try to get John McCain to shut up somehow.
Or that's because he's deliberately trying to sabotage the peace treaty that obviously is not perfect, but so far had been more or less held by the leadership of each side.
The one that the French and the Germans went in there and made, pushed Obama out of the way, made it.
Is he deliberately trying to sabotage Merkel's plan here, do you think?
No, I don't.
I think that the proof of that is that he sent John Kerry over to Sochi to meet with President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov.
I don't think that the president is on board with this kind of transformative project.
I think that he's a very bad manager.
I like the president and I'm not, I'm really more kind of a centrist.
I think that he has the good sense to know that sending in weapons and escalating this thing is going to draw a very brutal response from the Russians.
And so I think that, yeah, I think that part of his motivation in sending the trainers is political.
But I think that we're actually very fortunate that he is in the White House rather than someone like McCain, or rather than someone like Romney, who surrounded himself with the worst kind of neoconservative advisors.
But I think that after Obama leaves office, all bets are off, because I don't see on the horizon any candidate that will stand up to the neoconservative interventionists, except maybe someone who doesn't really have a chance at becoming president, like Bernie Sanders.
And I fear that Senator Paul probably doesn't have much of a chance either, but he probably wouldn't go along with this project either.
But those are two in a field of, I don't know how many candidates there are now, almost 15 or so on both sides, 20, I don't know.
So I think the prospects for peace in eastern Ukraine are not good.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time.
So far, I guess it could have been worse.
I mean, if John McCain had been the president starting in 2009, we wouldn't have even lived to 2015 to have this conversation.
We'd all died in the nuclear war with Russia a long time ago.
So I'm quite certain of that.
I, you know, I don't have any doubt of that.
So you're right.
As far as things go, I guess we're pretty lucky here, James.
It's all relative.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks very much for your time.
I sure appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
That's James Carden, everybody.
Writes at the American Conservative Magazine.
That's the anti-war right there, mostly.
He's a centrist, as he says.
Writes also for the National Interest and the Nation Magazine as well.
His latest there is called Neo-McCarthyism in the U.S. Media.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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