All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
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, on the line, I've got James Carden from the Center for East-West Accord, and here he's writing in Responsible Statecraft, that's responsiblesstatecraft.org, why Ostpolitik with Russia rungs along the East-West Divide.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing?
Thanks for having me.
I'm good.
How about yourself?
No, I'm doing really good.
Well, I'm doing fair to middling, to be perfectly honest with you, but yeah.
France and Germany are disenchanted with U.S. sanctions, but Poland and the Baltic states are far from ready for rapprochement.
So yeah, what is the dang deal?
Obviously, you know, the biggest, you know, kind of dividing line in Eastern European affairs these days is Ukraine, and America, of course, taking the more hawkish position, and the French and the Germans, for really since the Bush years, have been riding the brakes on NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia, right?
That's right.
That's right.
And, you know, the divide has obviously something to do with the legacy of communism and Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, but recent efforts by President Macron of France and Chancellor Merkel of Germany to even try to schedule a EU-Russia summit was met with great pushback.
Indeed, it was rejected by the European Council last Friday.
Those efforts were led by Poland and the Baltic states.
So you know, there's a real divide there on how to deal with Putin's Russia.
Do you talk with them or do you not?
And they seem to be following, you know, a harder line.
I mean, even we're talking to them now under Biden.
I mean, I thought that the Biden summit, while, you know, short on deliverables, was actually a very good thing.
So it's sort of disheartening to see an unwillingness on the part of many European states to even sit down at the table and talk with them.
Yeah.
Well, do the Poles have something to worry about that the Germans do not?
No.
I don't think so.
The idea that the Russian Federation has designs, has hegemonic designs on Eastern Europe, I think is a fallacy.
And I think that the Russians did themselves a great disservice in a way through their reaction in Ukraine.
And so that what they did by supporting what is, after all, an indigenous rebellion in eastern Ukraine and what they did through their questionable annexation of Crimea was give ammunition to the already, you know, paranoid national security establishments in those countries.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So you bring up in your article here, this former West German chancellor, Willy Brandt, and his politics during the Cold War in, I guess, 1970, you say he went and really kicked off the detente policy.
Is that it?
Well, he kicked it off in Germany.
It had already been kicked off by the mid-60s by France's president, Charles de Gaulle, who was the first Western leader to open up a policy, to pursue a policy, excuse me, of diplomacy and openness with regard to China and Russia.
So de Gaulle's policy anticipated Brandt's and indeed was the inspiration for Nixon's dual openings to Russia and China.
But it was, you know, Brandt's getting on, you know, both knees at a memorial to the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1944 that really, you know, signaled that the NATO slash American hard line that had been pursued up until that point was going to hold less sway in Germany.
And indeed it did.
Yeah.
And now, so it's funny, and it's something that we talked about over and over again.
You get to talking about detente in the battle days.
Well, there was the Soviet Union to have such a poor relationship with back then.
But the flag came down 29 and a half years ago.
The red flag came down and was replaced by the Russian red, white and blue.
And the the Soviet army, to be perfectly detailed about it and factual about it, they pulled back behind the Ural Mountains.
The Soviet Union was over.
The USSR is dead and gone.
Not even Belarus and Ukraine stayed in the union.
The whole thing was over.
And so how are we even in this position where we have kind of this mirror image of late 60s and early 70s kind of brinksmanship and tension with Russia when the entire excuse for it, which was the ideology of Soviet communism and the reality of their empire in Eastern Europe, is so long over?
That reminds me of something that the very good British columnist Peter Hitchens, who was the good Hitchens, has written over and over again.
And he points out that at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union dissolved the Warsaw Pact.
And so they gave up military hegemony over 700,000 square miles.
In the following years, NATO came in and gobbled up 400,000 of those 700,000 miles.
So it's been the West that has been the expansionist power in Eastern Europe, not the Russians.
And for some reason, our own foreign policy elites and the foreign policy elites, as we've seen in the Baltics and Poland and in the UK, seem to not have gotten the memo that the Soviet Union, that the current Russian Federation is a totally different animal than the Soviet Union.
You have ignoramuses such as MSNBC's Joanne Reid, who is basically a moron.
And she still believes that there's such a thing as communist Yugoslavia, she said that on her show a few years ago.
So these are different countries with different aims.
And the mistake is in equating what are often Putin's defensive moves and mistaking that for expansionist designs.
They don't have expansionist designs.
They don't want the expansion of NATO.
That's different than wanting to take over their neighboring countries.
And people, you know, point over and over again to their support for the rebels in Ukraine.
And that's fine, but they only have about a third of the Donbass.
And even that third that they sort of control, they don't want because they can't afford it.
And the people in the Donbass, who I've spoken to, know very well that Russia can't afford it.
And it would bring them, you know, enormous, they would bring with them enormous financial, enormous financial burden.
So we, our own elites tend not to be able to make the distinction between what Russia is doing defensively.
And they imagine that, you know, that they have some sort of sinister, you know, plan to reconquer great, you know, parts of East Central Europe.
I simply, that simply isn't the case anymore.
Yeah.
Well, do you think that maybe they think they're smart and they're deliberately keeping tensions high in Donbass just to keep the Russians bogged down in the Afghan style?
Well, yeah, that's possible.
It's also, you know, the tension in the Donbass region is a boon to the Ukrainian defenses and the Ukrainian budget, because they get all this, they get all this monetary support from the United States, from the EU and from NATO.
So for them, it's a pretty good deal.
Basically, what we have is a situation right now where both sides, the Russians and the Ukrainians, are fighting over a piece of land that neither of them actually want.
Right.
OK, hang on just one second.
Hey, y'all, Scott here for EasyShip.com.
Man, who wants to use Stamps.com?
They're terrible.
Their website is a disaster.
I've been sending out tons of signed books to donors and friends lately, and it's clear the only real alternative standing in line for the 1990s technology at the post office is EasyShip.com.
Preparing and printing labels with EasyShip.com is as easy as can be, and they are cheaper and better than Stamps.com.
You can even send 100 free packages per month.
Start out at ScottHorton.org slash EasyShip.
Hey, look here, y'all, you know I'm for the non-aggression principle and all, but you know who it's OK to kill?
That's right, flies.
They don't have rights.
Fly season is here again.
And that's why you need the Bug Assault 3.0 Salt Shotgun for killing flies with.
Make sure you get the 3.0 now.
It's got that bar safety on it so you can shoot as fast as you can rack it.
The Bug Assault makes killing flies easy and fun.
And don't worry about the mess.
Your wife will clean it up.
Get the Bug Assault today.
Just click the Amazon link in the right hand margin at ScottHorton.org.
In fact, you can do all of your Amazon shopping through that link and the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
Happy hunting.
Hey, y'all, Scott here for Lorenzotti Coffee.
It's great stuff.
It's actually how I'm conscious and recording this spot right now.
You probably also like and need coffee.
Well, Lorenzotti.coffee's got a great dark roast and these really cool grinders so you can brew it as fresh as possible.
Here real soon, they're also going to have a nice medium roast and other options available.
Check them out at Lorenzotti.coffee and use promo code ScottHorton.org to save 10%.
They ship fast and it tastes great.
Support good anti-government stimulant suppliers.
Go to Lorenzotti.coffee today.
Uh, and it is worth, uh, you know, mentioning in specific here that in, I think it was 2015, wasn't it?
That the people of Donetsk and Luhansk held a referendum for a plebiscite type thing and voted to join the Russian Federation and then Putin told them no.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that was it.
That has never been on his agenda at all.
And he could have simply just said, yeah, that's right.
And picked up a black magic marker and drawn a line on a piece of paper and it would have been a done deal.
They wouldn't have been able to do anything about it, right?
Not with Russian military support.
Absolutely not.
All right now.
So, um, talk about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, because I guess, did I read that the Biden government had backed off, but then they started threatening more sanctions again or something over this?
The threat of sanctions is always present now in American policy.
So whether or not they have issued new threats, um, uh, I'm not familiar with.
My understanding is, is that Biden did overrule his more hawkish advisors on the NSC and at the state department who wanted us to double down on sanctions, uh, with regard to Nord Stream, but Biden overruled them and he overruled them not as a friendly gesture to the Russians, certainly not, um, but, um, because of pressure from, from the Germans, because that is going to be Nord Stream is good for the German economy.
Um, and it was a very unfriendly gesture on our part to, towards our longstanding German ally.
So I think Biden was right there.
Now, can you imagine, let's just do a counterfactual here.
Can you imagine the outrage that we would have heard 24, you know, 24 hours a day, seven days a week on CNN and MSNBC, if, if Donald Trump did something like that, if he withdrew sanctions designed, uh, to, to, um, to, to stymie a Russian project, it would have been nonstop.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely true.
I mean, that really is the best thing about what happened here.
I read a thing by, uh, Ross Douthat, I guess in the New York times.
Yeah.
Where he's mostly just making fun of the media.
He didn't really make the important point that it's really good that the media are all such brazen lying, completely owned by the CIA, pathetic, cynical hypocrites because they just dropped all their Russia paranoia outright and said, Hey, whatever Biden decides to do with Putin here is great.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Yeah.
I thought that was a very, uh, very astute column from a only very occasionally astute columnist.
Yeah.
Um, but, but I mean, that is a, that is a real silver lining, right?
I mean, um, Oh sure.
Trump was, they falsely accused him of high treason with the Kremlin.
And so to make up for that, in fact, I'm pretty sure there's a direct quote from, uh, Trump jr saying now, see if you can call us compromised by the Russians now, after we send all these weapons to Ukraine and do all of this, that we're doing all these sanctions on the Nord stream pipeline and all these things to prove, you know, what, uh, Russian assets they weren't.
And now, so Biden is out from under that whole spin and I guess it's sort of acting like a senior democratic Senator might in a situation like this, right?
Yeah, that's that.
I think that's exactly right.
I think that, um, the thing that we have to worry about in the perhaps not too distant future is what happens if Mr.
Biden is not able to complete his term or if he doesn't run again and we're stuck with Kamala Harris, who I likened to Dan Quayle in a pantsuit, um, no, uh, she will be totally owned by the most hard line, uh, of the, uh, of the Biden advisors and appointees.
Um, and I think that we would under a Harris administration rush headlong into a very, uh, new and dangerous phase of this foolish new cold war that we, um, have undertaken.
Yeah.
She really is a big dummy in the W.
Bush style, right?
Where she didn't know the first thing about any of this.
I mean, a less impressive person he could not have, he could not have found, but it plays to his advantage because it, by in comparison, he looks, he looks terrific.
He looks like a, he looks like a statesman, uh, to her.
Um, but you know, to your point that you made about Trump, uh, before, if you look closely at the policies that he pursued compared to the policies that president Obama pursued with regard to Russia, Trump was a hundred times harder on the Russians.
Then Obama was, um, and he probably felt duty bound to pursue those policies because every time that he opened, well, I don't know if he actually, I was going to say every time Trump read a newspaper, but I, I'll take that back.
Yeah, no, false premise to your thing there.
Like on cable news, you know, he, he, he was being called, you know, a traitor and Putin's puppet and stuff like that.
So, yeah, I mean, he, he, he, he was being called a traitor and Putin's puppet.
Um, the media has, uh, much to answer for.
And, um, they, um, they really, uh, over the past four years, five years have really disgraced themselves.
Yeah.
Well, we lost important treaties over it, right?
We almost lost a start to, uh, thank goodness the Biden government saved that, but we did lose open skies and the INF treaty under Donald Trump too.
That's exactly right.
Uh, and so this media McCarthy-ite hysteria that, uh, the media had ginned up on completely, uh, false premises, um, by which I'm, I'm referring to the Steele dossier, obviously, um, you know, that played into the hands of the most hawkish neoconservative Trump advisors.
So it was a gift to people like John Bolton, uh, who, who had long had the INF and open skies, uh, in his crosshairs.
Right.
So there were real world, you know, real world policy consequences to this madness, uh, that, you know, disgraceful individuals like Rachel Maddow and Joanne Reed and Chris Hayes, um, you know, they were, that they were churning out day in and day out.
There are real, uh, dangerous, uh, policy consequences that, that occurred because of that.
Yep.
Um, and so going back to the fight in Ukraine, it was, um, I forget what year now, it must've been 2016 or 2017 when, uh, Holland, uh, the president of France and Angela Merkel, the strongman ruler of Germany now for 16 years, whatever it is, uh, the Iron Chancellor.
Yeah.
Um, they, uh, they came to DC and informed Obama that we're negotiating a piece in Ukraine.
And he said, okay.
And then they did.
And I forgot, I think that was Minsk too.
Cause Minsk one never really, you know, went into effect at all.
And Minsk two only, you know, was partially ever lived up to, I think by the various sides there.
And I know that there's still some fighting going on.
Uh, so it's not altogether settled, but now is it right that Merkel's on her way out and how bad is that for the rest of us?
Well, that depends on who, who follows.
Um, so Merkel, I had to my way of thinking, Ben, a, a horrible influence in Europe in terms of, uh, the economy.
Uh, however, she was a calming influence with regard to the trouble in Ukraine.
And you're right, uh, Germany and France formed the Minsk group and they did not include the United States was, which I thought at the time and still think is very wise, um, and because we are unable, because we have such a powerful and out of control Ukraine lobby in Washington, we're unable to recognize the simple fact that while Russia is, um, has not lived up to its end of the Minsk agreement, neither has Kiev, uh, but we are constitutionally somehow unable to, uh, to criticize, um, Ukraine because of the influence of this, um, out of control, uh, lobby where you have these Americans in these very powerful positions who, um, whose loyalty is not, their first loyalty is not to the United States, their first loyalty, uh, is to Ukraine.
And you saw that with Colonel Vindman and you saw that with, uh, the Chalupa people, uh, who, you know, played a very nefarious role in, um, in directing Ukrainian, uh, influence, uh, in the 2016, uh, campaign.
So you see this stuff all the time.
The Atlantic council acts as the de facto center of the Ukraine, of the Ukraine lobby, uh, and it was fast becoming one of the most powerful and insidious, uh, forces, uh, in Washington.
Yeah.
Now, um, we've talked about this numerous times, but it's worth bringing up every time because it's kind of the big deal.
Uh, we know thanks to Manning and Assange, still sitting in solitary confinement, Beaumarch prison there.
Um, that when our current director of central intelligence or that ain't right.
Current head of the CIA, William Burns went over there and met with Sergei Lavrov and I think 09, the foreign minister of Russia Lavrov told him Nyet means Nyet, and that was the title of the WikiLeaks.
Everybody can go and look it up.
And it's essentially Burns reporting back to the state department that I just talked with Sergei Lavrov and he made it pretty clear to me that he wasn't playing around and he wanted to make sure that we understood that they absolutely will not tolerate America bringing Ukraine into NATO.
So this is something we might want to consider.
And then the one more was, um, and I used to screw up and conflate these things, so sorry about that listeners.
But, uh, the other one was Putin, uh, told a Italian diplomat and Italian diplomat that, you know, we could be in Kiev in two weeks, right?
And so that goes to show where the line is.
And again, they're not threatening like, Hey, you better bring Ukraine into NATO because we could be in Kiev in two weeks.
They're saying you better not because that's what would cause us to try to do so and, and would cause them to succeed in doing so real quickly.
Um, so it's kind of amazing, isn't it?
That, that they even mess with this at all when they know exactly what they're dealing with here.
I mean, it's never been, they've never made a secret of that.
Uh, and that applies to Georgia as well.
And that's why part it's part of the reason why, uh, the Russians reacted the way they did in 2000, in August of 2008, when, uh, the neocon puppet, uh, Shakhizvili opened fire on, uh, Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia.
So this, they've never made a secret that, uh, Ukraine and Georgia, uh, joining NATO is a red line that cannot be crossed.
Uh, so we didn't necessarily need a wiki, a wiki leak of Bill Burns's cable because the Russians have been broadcasting that and shouting it from the rooftops, uh, for years.
Since you bring up, since you bring up Burns, uh, he's one of the few sensible, uh, and I think good appointee appointments that, that Biden has made.
Burns is a very experienced, uh, Russia hand, and he's not an ideologue.
And, um, and he's one of the few sane people who I hope acts as a counter weight to the lunatics that, uh, Biden has stacked his NSC and state department with.
Yep.
Including Robert Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland is back at it, right?
She's not only back at it, she's in a much more powerful position, uh, than she held under Obama.
So she was, she was assistant secretary, uh, of state for Europe and Eurasia under Obama.
Now she's undersecretary for, um, for political affairs.
Um, so she's, uh, at the upper, upper echelon, uh, at the state department.
Um, and she's very experienced.
She's very savvy.
She's very, very smart.
Um, and she, uh, you know, they're all personal friends.
They all, you know, so she and Blinken go back a very long way.
She and the deputy, Wendy Sherman, it's all, they're all from the same crowd.
Um, and so they, people like Sherman and Nuland are going to exercise enormous, um, influence, uh, in the, in the coming years.
So I, I'm quite relieved and happy that someone like Burns is, is over, is over at the agency.
All right.
We're almost out of time here, but, uh, can you tell us a little bit about what happened with the Royal Navy?
Uh, almost getting us into a war with the Russians last week in the black sea.
Yeah.
I mean, unbelievably, um, reckless, uh, and dangerous, um, totally unnecessary provocation, um, that they were, the HMS defender was sailing in, um, Russian waters in the black sea, um, ostensibly to show support for what is endlessly called Ukraine's territorial, um, integrity and territorial sovereignty.
Um, there is nothing, and I mean, nothing that NATO, Britain, or the United States can ever do short of atomic war that is going to bring Crimea back to Ukraine.
That is over.
And why we insist, um, on ignoring that reality is beyond me.
Now I'm not saying that, uh, we, we, we are duty bound to recognize it.
We're not.
Uh, but to make that a principle bone of contention in this new cold war makes absolutely no sense.
And so I think what the, the British did was extremely reckless, hubristic, and indeed, uh, if it escalated, would have dragged NATO and the United States into a shooting war with Russia, which is not something that is going to turn out well, and don't take my word for it.
I'm not a military analyst.
I am not a military historian, right?
The furthest I ever got was, I was, when I was in high school, I got a nomination to a congressional nomination to West Point.
That's as close as I've ever gotten to a uniform.
So don't take my word for it, but take someone like Colonel Douglas MacGregor's word for it.
Um, and MacGregor has said on many occasions that, uh, a war with Russia in East Central Europe is not winnable for NATO.
Uh, so it's not something that we should, that we should be playing with.
So I think it was very reckless thing that the British did.
Which, and by the way, and people can read a Mark Perry about this in Politico magazine from back a few years ago, that Douglas MacGregor is the guy who wrote up the war plan for how to fight Russia in Eastern Europe, if we did, he had his plan and McMaster had his, and there are the competing plans for just in case.
And then he's the guy telling you, in other words, there's no one more authoritative on the subject to tell you that we're not in any position to do this.
And in fact, you know, as Pat Buchanan said, he goes, you know, Ukraine is far East of what we ever used to call Eastern Europe, you know, this is not Eastern Europe, this is the Ukraine, this region that has always been dominated by Russia.
All right.
And it's North of Turkey for God's sake.
Well, right.
And as my late and much missed friend and mentor, Stephen F.
Cohen used to say all the time, you know, the first Cold War's epicenter was in Berlin.
Right.
The new Cold War's epicenter is way, way East in Kiev or in Donbass, right on Russia's border, and that's what makes this new situation potentially even more dangerous and explosive.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry I'm late.
I got to go.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show, James.
Always great to talk to you.
Scott, I appreciate you having me on.
Take care.
All right, you guys, that's James Carden.
He's at the Center for East-West Accord.
You can get their great email every morning on all Eastern European political issues here and America-Russia issues.
Here he is at Responsible Statecraft.
Why Ostpolitik with Russia runs along East-West Euro divide.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
