Alright you guys, Tom Woods has been trying to get me to do this forever on Facebook, but I hate Facebook.
But now I'm going to do it on Reddit instead.
Anyone who donates a monthly subscription donation at PayPal.com or at Patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show will get a ticket to join up my new private Reddit group at r slash Scott Horton Show.
Just email me and I'll get you set up.
Any single PayPal donation of $50 will get you a signed copy of my book, Fool's Errand Time to End the War in Afghanistan and $100 donation will get you either a QR code, silver commodity disc or a lifetime subscription to listen and think audiobooks.
Of course, I accept all kinds of digital currencies as well.
You can find out all this stuff at Scott Horton dot org slash donate.
And of course, don't forget to shop Amazon.com by way of my link and give me a review on iTunes, Stitcher or Amazon if you read the book and liked it.
Thanks.
Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax 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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying, 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 David P. Goldman.
He is an American economist and author and a regular writer at the Asia Times where he wrote this very important recent column.
I really hope you'll look at it.
And I know I always say that, but yeah, no, really this time it's important.
Trump is right about who's to blame for bad relations with Russia.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you doing, sir?
Scott, I'm doing great.
Thank you very much for having me.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
And what an important piece that you wrote.
There's so many different facets to it, but let's start with the Soviet union finally ceased to exist Christmas day, 1991.
And then what you hightailed it over there at the request of the Bush senior, the Clinton administration to help with the new Russia.
There was a flood of economists.
There was a whole migration of people going over there.
I was one of many on paper.
I was an advisor to the finance ministry, but finance ministry was basically empowered with stealing Russian assets and handed them to oligarchical friends of Boris Yeltsin.
I didn't do any advising.
I kind of just watched the people come by with bags of valuables on their backs.
Yeah.
And that's the way you wrote it in here was that, um, I think you say you were kind of with the neocons at that point, but their belief that free markets and democracy in the end of history was the answer to everything and that everyone else would naturally believe that too, with the end of global Marxism just wasn't really right here is just a straight thievery going on.
Well, some countries are a mess and are going to stay a mess.
And all we can do is contain the problems at the minimum cost to us and keep ourselves safe.
We can't spend vast resources and credibility trying to fix them.
And it's America's obsession with turning other countries into little limitations of the United States that gets us into trouble everywhere from Iraq and Afghanistan to Russia.
Well, now, so what about all this shock therapy?
Because it sounds like, um, the deal, you know, from the beginning was that this is what the Americans wanted to see happen was just the liquidation of all of, of, uh, the former Soviet Union's industrial assets and just let it all be stolen and Russia kicked down into the ground.
But you're saying that that happened in spite of America's intentions.
I think Americans basically had good intentions.
I don't think that we had a conspiracy to ruin Russia after the fall of communism.
However, the Soviet system was a system based entirely upon corruption.
Nothing happened without corruption.
The other word for socialism is corruption.
You put state resources worth trillions into the hands of a few ill-paid bureaucrats, they're going to steal with both hands.
So all the Russians knew how to do was to steal.
And when you let them loose, they stole everything.
And Yeltsin's government sat there while a few oligarchs got control of the economy, the economy was ruined.
Finally, Putin came in.
He's like Lucky Luciano.
He's the compote de tutti copy.
He orders the stealing.
He limits it.
He sets certain boundaries on it.
The Russian economy starts to come back again.
He's not a nice guy.
He's like the mafia boss who stops the mafia lures.
Yeah, but I mean, isn't the story that all these oligarchs were mostly a bunch of Israelis or just a few, um, you know, Russians who basically, you know, stole and then just left the country and the Americans weren't helping with that?
Oh, there are certain...
I thought that was what they liked about Yeltsin was that he was perfectly happy to overlook all this stuff.
Oh, let me stop you, Scott.
There are some Jewish oligarchs, but there are plenty of non-Jewish ones as well.
And Obama...
Well sure, I didn't mean that exactly, that they were all Jews.
The ideal of this is Putin.
Most of these guys were KGB.
There was only one leadership school in Russia, a place where you actually learned how to do things.
And that was the intelligence services.
Everything else were a bunch of toadies who stole what they could.
So it's not surprising that the leader of Russia comes out of the intelligence service because that was the only school of leadership that you could go through.
That makes sense.
Putin is not a nice guy.
Well, wait, let's hold off on Putin.
I'm interested in what exactly is shock therapy then?
Was it really, I mean, I see you mentioned polyeconomics, so that means you're friends with Jude Wineski, my old friend, the great Jude Wineski.
And he actually told me that he feels really bad about it.
He was the guy that introduced Richard Perle to Dick Cheney and helped create the neocon right-wing nationalist alliance back in the 1980s, interestingly.
Oh, I was Jude Wineski's business partner.
I was his chief economist.
Jude was a wonderful guy.
He was an idealist, sometimes with his head in the clouds, but God bless him.
He did such heroic work trying to stop Iraq War II.
I mean, I hope people don't forget that.
Jude and all of us were part of Irving Kristol's kindergarten back then.
It was Irving Kristol, Mr. Neocon, the guy who invented the word who arranged for Jude's year at the American Enterprise Institute, where he wrote his book, The Way the World Works.
And he always referred to Irving as the godfather.
Irving would come and speak at all of our conferences.
We were, in that respect, neocons.
We thought we could go out and fix the world.
As it happened, Teddy Forsman, the late Teddy Forsman, the private equity investor, was Jude's biggest client.
Teddy was friends with the then ambassador to Moscow, Bob Strauss, former head of the Democratic Party.
So, Bob Strauss arranged for Polyconomics to get credentials as advisors to the finance ministry.
And since I was the chief economist, I got a lot of the frequent flyer miles.
And so, am I understanding you right, then, that shock therapy, despite the kind of scary-sounding name or whatever, that you guys really were just trying to introduce market capitalism and to teach the Russians why they should do this and how it should work, but that the oligarchs liquidating and running off with everything was not part of that?
That was the failure of shock therapy to take place, or to kick in.
Is that right?
That's exactly correct.
There was no economics there.
It was simply a mad scramble to grab whatever people could.
And the Russian people were so browbeaten, so demoralized and listless in the face of this, they just weren't in a position to do anything.
They never had experience of democracy.
No Russian had ever run for school board, but for Congress.
All right.
Now, for some reason, Trump hasn't retweeted this one yet, but there's a great little montage going around of the Democrats from 2008.
First of all, Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney in one of the debates, but then also Madeleine Albright and Michelle Flournoy and Hillary Clinton herself, saying, man, Russia's all right under Putin.
We want to get along with them.
You think that they're our geopolitical foe?
Why, the 20th century call, they want their foreign policy back, Obama said, mocking Romney.
And they all agreed that we can get along with them.
Hillary said, look, they're helping us with the war in Afghanistan.
Things are going okay there, that kind of deal.
And yet, of course, now a few years later, we're to understand that Tsar Putin is prepared to invade and conquer all of Eastern Europe if we don't hurry up and bring all the last of the Balkan states into NATO and the rest of this.
So what changed just in the last few years?
Ukraine?
Well, remember, Ukraine was a response to the Maidan coup of 2014, which chased out Viktor Yanukovych, the elected leader of Ukraine.
The U.S. administration, particularly the State Department, with Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland in charge, thought that they had scored a coup against Russia by taking over Crimea.
Crimea, of course, is a Russian population province, which Khrushchev had put into the Ukraine in the early 50s in order to increase Russian control over Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union.
So when the coup occurred in 2014, the U.S. believed that the new Ukrainian government would take away Russia's rights to the big naval base at Sevastopol.
There was no way the Russians were going to accept that, so they invaded Ukraine and took it over.
That was a very nasty thing for them to do.
It was the only time in World War II that one state has used military force to change borders, and that's not something we like, obviously.
But nonetheless, it was a predictable response on the part of Russia, which does have a big strategic interest in Crimea and wasn't going to give it up.
Yeah, well, and of course, I mean, don't forget about the Kosovo War and America's support for Israel stealing all of Palestine.
There's some border changing going on right there from the river to the sea.
So it's not completely, I mean, you're right that it's completely illegal, but it's not completely unprecedented in the post-Cold War era, is it?
Well, that's right.
The Russians always pointed out that the United States support for the seizure of Kosovo from Serbia was the precedent for their intervention in Crimea.
We kind of set that one up.
In my view, it was completely stupid.
Here, we bombed a Christian country, namely Serbia, in order to show our goodwill to the Muslim world by supporting the Kosovo independence movement, who were basically a bunch of Albanian gangsters in whom we had no interest at all.
That was Bill Clinton and Neil Khan's display of confidence towards the Muslims.
Well, which was hilarious, too, because after September 11th, which was motivated by all of the rest of Bill Clinton's policies in the Middle East, like bombing Iraq from Saudi Arabia and support for Israel in their wars in Lebanon and in Palestine, they said Bill Clinton and two different Democratic congressmen complained openly after September 11th that, hey, but we fought on their side in Bosnia and Kosovo.
How could they be so ungrateful?
They really thought that they were bribing these guys, supporting bin Laden's friends in the Kosovo Liberation Army, that, oh, now they owe us a favor, so they won't knock our towers down, I guess.
Well, I thought that the war in Kosovo, war against Serbia in 1998, was a very bad decision.
There are many people who, in retrospect, would agree with that.
As far as Israel is concerned, Scott, every one of their wars was defensive.
They were compelled to take the West Bank in 1967 because the Jordanians were shelling them with artillery.
That's when you...
Well, they could have given it back a couple of months later, but here we are 50 years later, and now they say they never will give it back.
Well, if, you know, if you've ever been in the West Bank, if you have a good sniper rifle, you can sit in Palestinian villages in the West Bank, and you can pick off people at the main Israeli airport.
That's like the distance, it's not even a distance from Dallas to Fort Worth, like the distance from Manhattan to, you know, Fluffington, Queens.
They're tiny distances.
So without a peace agreement, of course they're not going to give it up.
Well, they don't want a peace agreement, they want us to take the land, right?
From the river to the sea.
That's the Likud Party doctrine, it always has been.
That's what Ariel Sharon said back in the 1970s, right?
Scott, the vast majority of Israelis, roughly 70 percent, would give up the West Bank in a heartbeat.
Well, that's not the question.
The question is the political parties in power, not the popular opinion, right?
Well, what has happened is that the confidence that the Israelis have that they have a peace party on the other side has diminished over the years due to the two Enfadas, and the fact that the Palestinians twice, in 1998 and 2006, or 2008 rather, under Olmert, rejected a division of the country which would have given them a two-state solution.
You know, we could argue about that all day.
I think the Israelis were in a defensive position, and the intransigence and irredentism of the Palestinians forced them to stay there.
And of course, if you stay there, you penalize the other side by facts on the ground.
I'm for land for peace.
Well, look, Donald Trump just recognized all of Jerusalem as Israeli territory.
That's not true.
Is that a step toward peace?
Well, by— Completely incorrect statement.
My friend Daniel Pipes, who's an ardent Zionist head of the Middle East Forum, has written, this is a dangerous precedent, because if Trump can recognize an American embassy in West Jerusalem, he could just as easily recognize a Palestinian embassy in East Jerusalem.
Trump left all those options open.
Okay.
Well, I guess we'll see.
It doesn't sound like the Kushner peace plan has much to do with letting the Palestinians have any independence or sovereignty whatsoever, but I guess we'll see.
You know, Robert Malley said that in 2000, they gave Arafat an offer he couldn't possibly accept.
He was part of that Camp David II negotiation.
And they said, oh, yeah, you can have Area A.
And then when he said, yeah, right, they said, oh, see how intransigent they are.
They won't settle for 10% of 22% of what's left of Palestine.
Just like they did to Milosevic in Serbia.
They said, here's the Rambouillet Accord.
You can sign on to letting NATO troops occupy your entire country, or we'll bomb you.
An offer he couldn't possibly accept, right?
That is Malley's view.
It's not the view of the vast majority of the people involved in that, including Bill Clinton.
The point is, Arafat didn't even make a counteroffer.
He didn't negotiate.
Neither did Abbas in 2008, when then Prime Minister Olmert offered him 95% of the West back.
Abbas bragged he walked away without a negotiation, just as Arafat had done.
And there's a reason for that, Scott.
For the last 70 years, the Palestinian leadership has told the Palestinian so-called refugees, who were 700,000 or 800,000, and 1948 are now supposed to be 5 million, they could all go back to Israel.
That was something they would live or die on.
And that's simply not going to happen.
They've got a great operation.
The West has funded them massively.
They've all become billionaires, running this little pseudo state.
Well, that much is true.
But the Palestinian Authority is a creation of the American and the Israelis under the Oslo Agreement.
It was supposed to only be a temporary thing until they get their second state.
I mean, I think you could find probably 100 different Palestinian commentators who would agree with you about Mahmoud Abbas and the corruption of the PA.
And yet still look at how unfairly the Palestinian civilians are being treated.
They live under a foreign country's martial law.
It's insane.
My view is it's all a complete goof.
In the post-war period, we've had dozens of population transfers.
We've had the Sudeten Germans kicked out, millions of them going to Germany.
We've had Greeks and Turks, in their millions, move to their respective countries during the Greek-Turkish War of the early 1920s, who are the Hindus and Muslims.
And of all those people who've been moved around, there's only one place where refugees haven't been assimilated.
Remember, a million Jews were kicked out of Arab countries in the 1940s.
The Iraqi community, which had been there for more than 2,000 years, left with their clothes on their backs.
Israel took in a million Jewish refugees, maybe 900,000, maybe 800,000, 900,000, whatever the number is.
Palestinian Arabs left the Jewish territory, so you had an exchange of population.
All of the Jewish refugees kicked out of the Muslim world were absorbed by Israel.
The Palestinians were left as hostages, as chess pieces, for negotiation.
And they're the only group of people in the world, in all of history, whose great-grandchildren are still considered refugees.
There's no second- or third-generation refugees, by legal definition, anywhere else in the world.
So the simplest thing to do is to eliminate the refugee status, just declare them stateless persons, get them resettled as best you can.
Or guarantee them independence, and then they'll have a state, and then they won't be refugees anymore, because at least they'll have the West Bank or Gaza to go to, as, you know, free and prosperous.
And this is the thing, right?
Arafat said he'd recognized Israel back in 1988, that if you let us have 22 percent, we'll recognize your 78 percent of the land.
But that's not good enough.
He said it in English.
He never said it in Arabic.
He always spoke out of both sides of his mouth.
And when he had a proposal on the table, which is pretty close to what he said he wanted at Camp David in 1998, he walked away from it, didn't negotiate.
And that's what makes the Robert Malley position kind of, I think, rotten, in my view, because these guys wouldn't take yes for an answer.
You put an offer on the table, and if they didn't like it, they could have said, well, here's what we want.
We want to change A, B, C, and D. But they didn't negotiate.
They didn't say exactly what they wanted.
You know what, though?
Let me ask you this, David.
You know, Rebecca Gordon has an article in Tom Dispatch, where she quotes Ariel Sharon in 1973, saying of the West Bank, we'll make a pastrami sandwich of them.
He promised to insert, quote, a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, and then insisted that, quote, in 25 years' time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.
So he's just talking about colonizing Judea and Sumeria, and keeping it over the dead bodies of the people who actually own that property, right?
I haven't seen the Sharon quote, and I can't vouch for its authenticity, but from the Israeli standpoint, from anyone's standpoint, if you have an intransigent enemy that won't negotiate, then the right thing to do is put pressure on them, and the way you put pressure on them is you change the facts on the ground.
However, as you and I both know, virtually all of the settlers in Judea and Sumeria live in about 5 or 10 percent of the land adjacent to the Green Line, and you could keep the vast majority of settlements in place by doing a small exchange of territory, and that would be 5 or 10 percent of the West Bank.
That's a perfectly workable deal, but the Palestinian side has never wished to negotiate.
As I said, they walked away, Abbas walked away, Arafat walked away, there was never a counter-proposal.
So we don't know, as a matter of record, what the Palestinian side wants, because it never said so.
Yeah, but I mean, come on, man.
Look, David, I mean, come on.
The Israelis have all the power and all the money.
The Palestinians lost the war 50 years ago.
They've been conquered and defeated for 50 years, and you're saying all of the burden is on them to appease the Israelis.
It's crazy.
No, I'm saying the burden is on them to say what they want, and they never said it.
You've never had a Palestinian counter-proposal to either the Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak 1998 proposal, or the Ehud Olmert 2008 proposal.
We don't know what the counter-proposal is.
They don't like the map on the ground.
What's their map?
They don't like the exchange of territories.
What exchange of territories would they propose?
And yet, but we know that like when John Kerry, there's a great article, Sarah something or other in New York magazine that did the full bit on John Kerry's, you know, half-assed effort anyway, to try to come to an arrangement.
And it was the Israelis who were absolutely intransigent.
The Israelis who after more than a year of this said, whoa, no maps.
We can't look at maps.
No one had an agreement that we would break out a map yet.
That story has been thoroughly debunked.
Those were mapped from 1947, which were misrepresented.
The story is completely bogus.
It's been, you know, it's been refuted in great detail.
Well, the Secretary of State sure seemed to think that the Israelis were dragging their feet and running out the clock.
Well, the Secretary of State was Barack Obama's Secretary of State.
Barack Obama was a great believer in the oppressed third world fighting for its rights against the terrible white metropole.
That's been his view since he wrote Dreams of My Father, been his view his whole life.
That was an administration which viewed America and its allies as the oppressors in the world and the terrible liberation movements as the equivalent of the American civil rights.
I mean, I really wish that was true.
I think, I think Barack Obama saw the world in virtually the exact same way as Bill Clinton did.
And he was a center left, you know, he was basically just Hillary with blackface on.
I don't, I don't see Barack Obama as any kind of leftist at all.
If he, if he was, and he meant that, then why didn't he tell Benjamin Netanyahu to end the occupation?
He never did.
He could have.
The President of the United States does not have all the power in the world.
Remember that Israel is America's most important ally in the Middle East.
It's effectively the third or fourth most powerful military in the world.
I don't know how France would fare in a confrontation with Israel.
Huge amounts of power.
The whole point of having allies in the Middle East is they can do stuff that we can't do much cheaper.
For example, backing Al-Qaeda in Syria.
Oh, you think that Israel backed Al-Qaeda in Syria?
Well, America did too.
And Turkey and Saudi.
Yeah, Jabhat al-Nusra.
Israelis never liked that, as a matter of fact.
I mean, come on, you can read in the Jerusalem Post about Netanyahu visiting Al-Qaeda fighters in the hospital.
Palestinian Druze shot up an ambulance full of Al-Qaeda guys just to make a PR statement out of the thing.
Well, it's one thing to visit guys in the hospital and treat the wounded.
It's another thing to support Al-Qaeda.
The Israeli view, which, by the way, is a fairly cynical one, is they've always preferred Assad to the Sunni rebels, because Assad is the guy they've been able to do business with since the 1967 war.
So the Israelis never liked the American policy, the Obama policy, of supporting the Sunni rebels who were all basically Al-Qaeda guys.
But that's not what Ambassador Oren said.
Ambassador Oren said from the very beginning of this, we wanted to see Assad gone.
And Israeli strategists told the New York Times they wanted to see both sides continue to hemorrhage to death.
They were backing off the total overthrow of Assad, but they wanted to see the war last.
That's an old joke.
During the Iran-Iraq war, Henry Kissinger said he wanted both sides to lose.
And Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli prime minister, said he wanted them both to win.
So yes, in a sense, the Israelis were quite happy for the two sides to be shooting each other up.
But long term, they would have preferred a stable Syria under Assad than the mess that came afterwards.
So it's absolutely not true that the Israelis were backing Al-Qaeda.
Much more importantly, for example, the Israelis can go bomb the crap out of Iran in Iranian installations in Syria.
We don't like the Iranians.
We think they're a danger.
It's good for us to do that.
They could take out the Osirak reactor in Iraq.
You know, Dick Cheney and President Reagan thought that was a wonderful thing.
Of course, they had to slap them on the wrist publicly, but they thought that was great.
And of course, all it did was it forced Saddam's nuclear program underground.
And so they didn't realize till after Iraq war one that he actually had taken his IAEA inspected and safeguarded civilian nuclear program and turned it into a covert weapons program that was only discovered after the defeat in 1991.
There are always advantages and disadvantages, but at the time, it seemed like a good idea.
And it certainly bought time from the American standpoint.
If we had done those kinds of things, we would have been in danger of a military confrontation with Russia, which we didn't want.
Allies can do our dirty work for us in a way that's arm's length from us.
It's cheaper.
They take the risk.
They put their soldiers and pilots' lives at risk.
We don't.
That's why it's good for us to have powerful allies as a matter of pure, cynical self-interest.
And the American defense establishment, Pentagon, is doing to the Israelis at the hip because they're so damn good at what they do.
Barack Obama didn't like the Israelis.
He wanted to beat them up as much as he could.
But he had a very powerful Israeli constituency, the American military, which depends on the Israelis.
And of course, he had a Congress, which is very pro-Israeli.
So there was a limit to what he could get away with.
He was just the president.
He wasn't a dictator.
He couldn't formulate all the policy by himself.
So that's why Barack Obama wasn't tougher on Netanyahu than he was, because the majority of Americans, by a margin of four or five or six to one, Americans support Israel in that conflict, as opposed to the Palestinians.
That's what the Gallupers say.
That puts a constraint on what any particular president wants.
I attribute very anti-Israeli motives to Obama.
And to get back to your question, which was a reasonable question, why wasn't he tougher on them?
I think it's because he couldn't be.
All right, Shaul, here's who sponsors this show.
Mike Swanson, author of The War State, the rise of the military-industrial complex in America after World War II.
It's just great.
And also, he gives investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com.
Subscribe there.
And when you do, you'll want to follow his advice and buy some precious metals for your savings.
You go to robertsandrobertsbrokerageinc, rrbi.co, and tell him Scott sent you.
Read No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakchani, How to Run Your IT Business Like a Libertarian, zencash at zencash.com or zensystem.io, and thebumpersticker.com, stickers for your band or your business or whatever you need, thebumpersticker.com.
And if you want a new 2018 model website, and you want to save some money, go to expanddesigns.com slash scott, and you'll save 500 bucks.
All right, well, let's talk about Russia some more.
There's your pro-Zionist take, everybody.
Absolutely.
I'm a proud Zionist.
Yeah, that's fine.
So, Ukraine.
America overthrew the government there twice in 10 years.
We tried.
Well, we helped.
We didn't do it uniquely, but we were certainly involved.
Exactly to what extent, we won't know until the archives are opened, if ever.
But we were certainly involved.
So, James Carden pointed out to me that there was a British parliamentary report.
I don't know where else this was reported, honestly.
I don't know if there's any journalism about this.
But there was a British parliamentary investigation that showed that after the maiden coup of 2014, that I believe it was three, could have been four, I think it was three former, and these would have been Western leaning, three former Ukrainian presidents signed a letter saying, we've got to kick the Russians out of Sevastopol.
And that that was really the line.
It wasn't even the coup.
It was that statement, that we are going to follow through now and try to kick the Russians out of Crimea.
And that was only after that, that the little green men with no insignia on their uniforms emerged from the Russian naval base and seized the peninsula without killing anyone.
It's important to know.
People always say, oh, Russia invaded Crimea.
Well, I mean, sorta, kinda.
They certainly seized it, but they already were there and they didn't kill anybody in doing so.
But I wonder if you know about that, if you could talk about that part.
I'm not aware of the Russian parliamentary investigation, but there's no...
No, the British, it was UK.
UK rather, but it's, excuse me.
I'm not aware of that particular story, but there's no question that the Russian view was that the purpose of the Maidan coup was to take Crimea away from Russia and get rid of the naval base at Sevastopol, as you mentioned, and that the invasion of Crimea, such as it was, which was really a Russian province, was a response to that.
And that the United States did, with a certain amount of malice, a forethought, try to encourage this.
So when Trump talks about other administrations mismanaging our relationship with Russia, that's one of the examples of how we mismanage it.
The United States doesn't have a strategic interest in Crimea.
We're not gonna make it an American province.
It's not gonna become pro-Western.
It's a Russian province.
My own view is that the Russians should not have acted illegally in that way, even if they had a certain amount of justification.
What they did was certainly illegal from an international law standpoint, and it's a very bad precedent to run around changing borders by force, even if, as you point out, the United States did, in a certain way, create a precedent for that with the Kosovo disaster.
The right thing to have done would have been a Saarland type of referendum.
I'm referring to the referendum in what's now the German province of the Saarland in 1955, I believe.
There was a question as to whether it should be part of Germany or France.
They voted to be part of Germany.
That was international supervision.
Once it was done, it was legal.
Everyone signed off on that.
Something like that for Crimea would be a good idea.
For example, you have the Donbass region, which is between Crimea and western Ukraine.
It's the eastern province of Ukraine.
It's a rust bucket, depressed region, aging population, Russian majority, and that's where most of the fighting has been going on.
I don't think Putin wants that.
It costs money for anyone who governs it.
Yeah, and they asked him to absorb it into Russia.
The Donbass had a vote and said, please make us part of Russia like you did with Crimea, and Putin said no and refused to accept them.
Well, that's exactly right, because it's in Putin's interest, as my good friend Angelo Cotevilla likes to point out, it's in Putin's interest to keep Ukraine unstable and make that a permanent low-level civil war, make it a running sore for the West.
He wants the instability.
It's in our interest to get a solution.
Now, it's not the greatest priority in the world.
Western Ukraine is Catholic and pro-Western.
Eastern Ukraine is Russian Orthodox and Russian-speaking, and partition would not be a bad solution, in my view.
I've raised that possibility for the past 10 years.
The best thing to do is just make that thing go away, find some solution, get everyone to stop fighting, because it's simply not important to us.
My worry about Russia is, although there are only 147 million people now, as opposed to a Russian bloc of 375 million people in 1981, where Reagan came into power, they still create all kinds of problems for us.
For example, they probably have the best air defense systems in the world, the S-400, very soon the S-500.
What does that mean practically?
Well, if they sell the S-400 to the Chinese, it means they can sweep the skies over Taiwan.
If, God forbid, there's ever a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, they could basically shoot down anything over Taiwan, because that thing has a several hundred kilometer range.
Things like that bother me.
Those are real sources of Russian influence and potential mischief.
What I would like to do with Russia is have a Manhattan Project-style program to neutralize all of the air defense stuff.
We know what kind of technologies can do it.
Our drone swarms would be obvious, but that's a drawing board kind of thing.
Making them work is not so simple.
What I find ridiculous, Scott, is that we spent $7 trillion—according to Steve Bannon's estimate in CNBC yesterday—$7 trillion in nation-building in the Middle East, and we spent virtually nothing on neutralizing Russian high-tech air defense, which could be a serious problem for us.
If we were to turn Russia's best weapons systems into the equivalent of eight-track tape players and wipe out their weapons industry, that would clip Putin's wings pretty quickly.
You know what, though?
I kind of wonder whether that might be a bad thing, that maybe we're better with some kind of parity, and that when we go trying to ring their country with anti-missile missiles, or if we come up with a way to neutralize all their air defenses, then that just pushes them into further panic and into arms races in other ways, advances in new nuclear weapons, and that kind of thing.
Maybe Julius Rosenberg is a hero for helping give them the A-bomb and creating a balance of power in the world that's prevented major power wars since then.
Well, a lot of people had that argument in the 1980s, and Ronald Reagan didn't listen to them.
Ronald Reagan introduced a whole set of new weapons technologies which neutralized Russian advantages.
Some of them actually came from Harold Brown's Defense Department before Reagan came in.
For example, all the new avionics, look down, shoot down radar, for example, that convinced the Russians by the early 80s that they would lose the conventional war.
And it certainly was a risk.
You're right that there's a risk to maintaining a technological lead.
You can spook the Russians.
You can create the possibility for a confrontation.
But when it comes down to it, I feel much safer if the United States is the most powerful nation in the world, can neutralize other people's weapons technologies, and defend ourselves and our allies.
But I mean, you are talking about defensive weapons.
They're anti- aircraft.
Those aren't the kind of weapons they could attack us with.
I'm all for neutralizing those.
But you see what I mean?
And also, I mean, even the missile defense systems are interpreted as part of an offensive weapons system.
It's to increase the ability to get away with a first strike against them and be able to shoot down their retaliatory capacity.
And we saw Trump, I mean, Putin just a couple of months ago did that big press conference where he debuted all these at least supposed new technologies to attempt to counteract all of that.
I don't believe that Putin thinks for a second that we have any intention of a preemptive strike against Russia.
The United States has never done anything like this.
We've got interest in it.
So keeping ourselves safe from missile systems is very much in our interest.
And my response to the Russians if they complain about it would be, if you characters had not helped the North Koreans develop offensive missile capabilities, we wouldn't have to do this in the first place.
So it's your own silly fault.
And that's where the North Koreans from the rocket motors they got from the Russians and that kind of thing.
The Russians, we know from NATO research, that the North Koreans got rocket designs, not just rocket motors, and tons of Russian technicians.
They had a lot of Russian personnel working at laboratories in North Korea, helping them develop their system.
In what timeframe?
This was over the last 20 years, well after the fall of communism.
This was exposed very effectively by the former head of the German defense ministry planning group, his name is Hans Ruhle, and he was writing in the German newspaper Die Welt.
There have been a series of articles about that, and a number of other experts.
And that's in this decade as well?
That's correct.
Russians play all kinds of games.
They keep their finger in a lot of pots and stir things up to see what they can get away with.
In this case, they created a whole lot of headaches for us.
In the case of North Korea, that's the strongest reason in my view to have space-based missile defense.
Chinese won't like it either.
That's certainly a risk.
You're right to say it's a risk for us to maintain technological superiority.
It does rile people up.
But the bigger risk is letting these weapons proliferate and eventually be used, God forbid, against the United States.
Yeah.
You know, the thing is, we talk about unthinkable war, and it hasn't happened in all this time, even during the days of the USSR and Joe Stalin and all these things.
But I wonder if we're overlooking a bigger danger, which is the one that you talk about in your article here, that the Americans may convince themselves, do you think, that they could actually overthrow Putin?
You have a few quotes here.
I know there was one by the head of the NED, Michael Gerson, in the fall of 2013, just as the Maiden protest was getting started, where he said at the end, it was in the Washington Post, he said, and if the Russians don't like it, they may find themselves on the receiving end of one of these programs here real soon.
And you have another couple of quotes like that, too, where these people think at least that they could cause some kind of revolution or overthrow in Russia.
I don't know how hands-on they want to be about it, but they sure seem to be thinking that way, huh?
There is also a certain amount of thinking in the United States intelligence community that it is a good thing to have some jihadists run around, because just as we saw in Afghanistan, they can make all kinds of trouble for the Russians.
One out of every seven citizens of the Russian Federation is a Muslim.
The Russians have a considerable problem with Islamist jihadism.
So there are people who think that that's a soft underbelly of Russians as well.
Now, unfortunately, that's a minority view.
But that kind of thinking is very dangerous.
It's delusional, in my view.
We're not going to overthrow Putin.
All of our pressure on Putin has only made him more popular.
The Russians are very nationalistic.
They don't like other people.
Telling them how to run their affairs.
So it's backfired on us.
And it certainly has made Putin into a prospective adversary.
And just as President Trump said, we have mismanaged that relationship and ended up with very bad relations with Russia.
So, ixnay on the meddling in internal Russian affairs.
It's just stupid.
You know, if I could wave a magic wand and turn Russia into an American style democracy, I would.
If I lived in Russia, which of course I won't, I wouldn't vote for Putin.
I'd vote for the democratic opposition.
I like living in a democracy.
I'm an American.
But what the Russians choose is not my business.
Yeah.
Well, now, so I wonder about, well, a couple things here before I forget.
First of all, do you know much about what happened in 2011?
You know, at least supposedly the story is that Hillary really did try to intervene in those parliamentary elections.
And this is part of maybe what motivated Putin to be so anti-Clinton.
And then secondly, can you talk to us about the right wing to the right of Putin waiting for their chance?
Well, there is a so-called Eurasian tendency in Russia, which believes that the United States and the West are corrupt and ready to fall and so forth.
I think their influence has simply waned in the last dozen years because Putin has been so effective and been so popular.
That's something to watch and be concerned about.
But I don't see that as a clear and present danger to the United States.
As far as the 2011 events, I don't have any hard evidence of what the United States was up to.
So I'll pass on.
Okay.
Fair enough.
And on the thing about the Russian right wingers, I don't know who they might be.
Vladimir Zirinovsky, I think, probably doesn't have that much power.
He used to be a much more famous and influential name back, I guess, 20 years ago.
But I've heard the comparison made to the aftermath of World War I and that what we're doing with NATO expansion and with all the different ways that we're kicking Russia while they're down is a lot like a parallel to the aftermath of the Versailles Treaty and kicking the Germans while they're down.
And so everybody demonizes Putin as though he's Hitler, but maybe he's Hindenburg.
And maybe if this sort of pseudo-democratic structure in Russia is put under too much pressure by us, maybe it'll fall and be replaced by something much worse.
There's a very different cultural phenomenon going on in Russia as opposed to Germany, and that has to do with Russian Christianity.
In my view, that's a very important distinction.
According to the Pew survey, which is the most authoritative source that I know, there has been an enormous increase in identification with the Russian Orthodox Church from about 40% at the time before communism to about 70% now.
Interestingly, about 80% among Russian women.
Russia has become, surprisingly, one of the most Christian countries in the world in terms of what people tell pollsters about their professed beliefs.
Germany saw a collapse of Christianity and a turn towards neo-paganism, a pagan kind of self-worship of the Aryan race, which was inherently anti-Christian.
So I see Russia much more as reverting to a more 19th century, czarist kind of nationalism in terms of its emotional character than a German kind of Nazism.
We do not see at the street level or the electoral level anything resembling a fascist movement in Russia.
We saw a few things like that in the 1990s at the worst of the economic disaster following the collapse of communism.
Those were worrying tendencies, but there's virtually no sign of a boots on the ground kind of fascist movement developing.
It's important to watch and to be concerned about, but I think we're dealing with something much older, which is the old Russian orthodox Christian nationalism.
Are they going to have to amend the constitution for Putin to stay?
He looks like he's going to be president for life here, no?
I don't know how he's going to handle that.
But they would have to amend the constitution, wouldn't they?
Or did they already?
Well, he had to alternate with Medvedev as president because of constitutional limitations.
Whether he will do that or not, I do not know.
I don't think Putin's indispensable.
You do need, as I said, a coppity-tooty copy, but it doesn't necessarily have to be Putin.
And then, you know what?
I read this thing that was about how—oh, it was Bernard at Moon of Alabama had a thing about how this is all Kissinger's policy.
What Trump is trying to do in getting along with Russia is he's following Henry Kissinger's advice.
They call it treason and pretend that Trump's some Manchurian candidate.
But what it is, is Kissinger, who helped split China away from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, is now advocating that we tilt back toward Russia against China, and that that's what's really going on here.
And I guess some major part of the American establishment didn't get the memo that we're switching sides.
We're trying to—since Bush and Obama did so much to push the Russians and the Chinese back together again, the strategy now is to try to split them apart by making better friends with the Russians.
Do you think that's right?
Well, first of all, to the extent that I follow Kissinger's views—I mean, he's very elderly, and he's in his 90s, so he doesn't say a great deal these days—Kissinger is very soft on China.
He's not looking for a U.S.-Russian alliance to beat up China.
He's soft on China to begin with.
He wrote a book in China about two, three years ago, which was very, very mild.
So I don't think that— He's defended Putin quite a bit, too, though, right?
Well, that's right.
But remember, back in 1981, when the rubber hit the road in the Cold War, we were 225 million people.
Russia and its satellites were 375 million people.
They were spending 30 percent of their GDP, or 25 percent, on the military, so they had a vast military establishment.
It wasn't clear whether we were more powerful or whether they were.
It really wasn't until the technological breakthroughs came in avionics and other things that I mentioned that showed who was superior.
That was based on a technological leap, not on the amount of spending.
At that time, Kissinger thought that it was impossible to win the Cold War, and we just had to get whatever deal we could.
That was the talk.
That was based on game theory at Harvard and all kinds of pseudomathematics, a lot of baloney.
And Reagan, in contrast to Kissinger, thought we could win the Cold War.
And Reagan was right, Kissinger was wrong.
Now we've got a Russia which has 147 million people as against our 300 million.
Its former satellites are, for the most part, our allies.
Their economy is the size of Italy's, a tiny fraction of ours.
Their military is a tiny fraction of ours.
So to talk about being accommodative in some respects towards Putin or trying to work out a deal means something totally different than it did back in 1981.
So I wouldn't be howling at the moon in Alabama about this.
Yeah, I gotcha.
You know, I remember when you mentioned about Putin having to go to sit in the parliament for a couple of years and let Medvedev be the president for a while before coming back, I remember seeing an interview of Kissinger where he said, listen, this is not the behavior of a dictator, okay?
You may not like him on everything, but if he wanted to be a dictator, he would just declare himself the dictator.
The fact that he's taken a couple of years to go back to the parliament means that he wants to preserve the Russian constitutional system as it is with or without him, and that that's important.
In some respects, he's acting under the cover of the constitution.
In other respects, he does some very dirty things.
It is very dangerous to your health to be a critic of the Putin regime.
People tend to wake up dead in the morning or fall out of windows.
I don't want to underplay how tough an SOB Putin is.
I don't like the way he is.
I know a lot of people who've left Russia out of fear of their lives and are horrified by what's going on here.
Personally, as an American, I couldn't live in a country where things like that happened.
I sympathize personally with Putin's democratic opponents, all the people who the National Endowment for Democracy and so forth is supporting.
I go to luncheons organized by conservative organizations with people like Garry Kasparov and other opposition figures in Russia, and I sympathize with them because I'm an American.
I like democracy.
I don't want to underplay how nasty Putin is.
I disagree with people who want to whitewash it.
On the other hand, I don't think it's our job to fix that problem.
Well, you know what happens is they do this with Saddam and they do this with Kim and whoever.
They say any leader who's that cruel to his own people can be counted on to be aggressive against foreign neighbors too and this kind of thing.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
I mean, Kim is certainly a danger to us and our allies.
I don't like the idea of the North Koreans having the capability to drop nuclear missiles on Japan, much less on the United States.
So I think that we do have to address it.
It is a strategic risk to us.
Saddam was a somewhat different issue.
I think the simplest thing to have done with Saddam probably was to depose him and put some other strongman in place and then leave.
The guy was something of a risk.
So that's a bit more difficult evaluation.
But in each case, the criteria, Scott, should be exactly what President Trump said.
Is it important for us?
What does it do for the United States of America?
Are they a threat to us, in which case we find some way to address it?
Or if they're just nasty to their own people, well, their own people are going to have to deal with it.
I think American embassies should keep copies of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers and give them to anyone who's curious about our system.
And if they want to imitate us, God bless them.
But it's not our job to fix the world.
Yeah.
Well, and so what do you think about NATO expansion east of Germany, then?
I don't think that it was, in general, a good idea.
In the case of Poland, I would make an exception.
The Poles were invaded numerous times by the Russians.
They were partitioned by the Germans and Russians twice.
We have a deep cultural affinity to the Poles.
We have a very large Polish-American community.
We have an emotional and historic connection, going back to Cusco.
So bringing Poland into NATO made a great deal of sense to me.
Everyone else, I think NATO expansion was basically unnecessary.
And there are plenty of people, for example, Professor Michael Mandelbaum at Johns Hopkins, who had argued the same thing.
It's interesting what you say about, you know, passing out constitutions and the Declaration, and this kind of thing.
It seems like, if the neocons really believe their stuff about the end of history and free markets and democracy being the future of mankind and all that kind of thing, I mean, I certainly believe in property rights and markets and natural rights and self-government, one way or the other.
The more self, the better when it comes to that.
But it seems like, if they really believe that, they should have been able to tell, if they weren't just arms salesmen half the time, that actually a much better way to change the world into accepting those beliefs would be just what you said, propagandizing them all, not ever killing them, not ever threatening them, but just saying, this is how we do it.
And even mocking them and shaming them for not having as good of a Bill of Rights as us, while at the same time, we work to make sure that our Bill of Rights is really enforced here, and that our society is the freest economy and the freest, personally, that it could be, and lead the world by example, it seems like, just take the counterfactual, since 1991, how different the world would be if that was the tactic, instead of all this empire expansion and regime change.
Well, having known all the leading neocons personally for many years, I have no doubt that men like Norman Podorec and Irving Kristol and his son, Bill, and late Charles Krauthammer, were all entirely sincere in their beliefs.
In fact, I think their problem was they were too sincere.
They were ideologically blinded by their belief that the form of a political system was going to change the way people think and create new metas, kind of like a right-wing Marxism, being determines consciousness, change the base, change the superstructure, whatever.
But I've never doubted their sincerity.
Interesting.
And that goes for all of them?
Every one of them whom I know, including Richard Perle, I would not for a second doubt the sincerity of any of the leading neocons.
I don't think there's any hypocrisy there, I think, if anything, there is a deep ideological commitment to a somewhat inadequate way of understanding the world.
Yeah, but at the same time, don't they have that sort of noble lie and ends justify the means kind of thing?
And as Paul Wolfowitz said, you know, hey, weapons of mass destruction, we settled on that for bureaucratic reasons.
But really, we just want to remake the world.
So they're willing to lie to us to get their very sincere beliefs implemented, right?
Every single statesman has lied to the public in some respect or other.
The basic neocon belief, for example, what Charles Krauthammer called in his celebrated address on democratic realism to the American Enterprise Institute in 2003, I don't believe any of that had the slightest modicum of insincerity to it.
There may have been tactical lies by administrations, but all administrations do that.
I wouldn't attribute that to there being neocons at all.
Right.
I guess they just didn't really see the contradiction, the way a libertarian like myself would, between promoting free markets and democracy with war.
And that's not, you know, the U.S. military is not a free market, nor is it self-government when it comes and occupies somebody else's country.
So when it comes to ends justifying the means, it seems like their ends, their means determine vastly different ends than the ones they had in mind.
Well, the way they looked at it was, we occupied Germany and Germany became a democracy, we occupied Japan, Japan became a democracy.
Why don't we try that model in lots of other places?
And the fact is, Germany and Japan had had democracies in the past.
And they also had the USSR hanging over their head and really needed an American friend, too.
Absolutely.
In the case of Russia, as I said, no Russians ever run for school board, but plus for Congress, same as no Iraqi.
They may have a notional Congress, but these are countries where the idea of representative democracy has never had anything to do with their culture.
Our idea of representative democracy took hundreds of years to develop, starting by the Protestant idea of electing your own church elders.
That's Presbyterianism.
You had self-government in New England, self-government in the colonies.
We learned democracy and the English learned democracy over hundreds of years.
It's not something you switch a light on and make happen.
All right.
Well, listen, David, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
It's been very interesting.
Fun talking to you, but get your facts straight on Israel.
I think you have some live spots there.
Yeah.
When will the Palestinians ever let the poor Israelis be free?
That's a big question.
All right.
Thanks again.
Okay.
Good talking.
Okay, guys, that is David Goldman.
He is the author of It's Not the End of the World.
It's Just the End of You, the Great Extinction of the Nations and How Civilizations Die and Why Islam is Dying Too.
And check out this very important article at the Asia Times.
It's atimes.com.
It's called Trump is Right about Who's to Blame for Bad Relations with Russia.
All right, y'all, that's it for the show.
Check me out at libertarianinstitute.org, scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, twitter.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Appreciate it.
And buy my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
