For Pacifica Radio, July 9th, 2017.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
You'll find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org, and you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
All right, you guys, introducing James Carden.
He is a writer for The Nation magazine and is executive editor for the American Committee for East-West Accord.
That's eastwestaccord.com, and he's got a brand new one today in The Nation, A Fateful Encounter, on today's meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm all right.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing very well.
I appreciate you joining us on the show today, and yeah, boy, talk about fateful, huh?
The two, at least, nuclear superpowers.
I guess Russia isn't really a superpower in terms of other measures anymore.
They sure still are a superpower when it comes to the H-bombs and the means to deliver them, no question there.
So, you know, I'm not exactly sure where to begin this thing.
Obviously, there's the G20 meeting there where they met today, the two leaders, Putin and Trump, and I guess, is it okay with you if we start with the liberal media consensus on Twitter that Trump is Vladimir Putin's slave and Manchurian candidate and that the announced ceasefire in Syria, for one thing, is just an indication of the control that the Russians have over our president, who is such a coward.
He refuses to accuse Putin to his face of getting him elected, etc., like that.
What do you think of all that?
I don't think very much of it.
I'm not surprised that liberal Twitter is reacting in that way.
I suspect that they, you know, believe Trump might be in the process of selling back Alaska to the Russians.
I mean, they are, you know, completely unhinged when it comes to this topic.
Evidence, facts, and logic never get in the way of their narrative, and I think that's too bad.
And it's certainly bled into the mainstream coverage of Putin and Trump.
The New York Times, for instance, which is a reliable indicator of liberal media consensus, just published a piece by Neil McFarquhar titled, For Russia, Trump-Putin meeting is a sure winner.
Well, I don't know how he could possibly know this, given that the meeting just ended and that details are still dripping out.
And, you know, some reports indicate that, you know, Trump did indeed raise the issue of election hacks with Putin.
But Trump should be somewhat, I think, cautious there, raising the specter of Russian electoral influence.
Because, really, when you think about it, the United States doesn't really have a leg to stand on when it comes to that topic.
There was a study that I cite in my new piece in The Nation by a Carnegie Mellon researcher that found that the United States interfered in at least 80 foreign elections between 1946 and the year 2000.
Including in Russia.
Including, right, including the 1996 election in Russia.
And, obviously, it goes without saying, we played a non-too-helpful role in Ukrainian politics in the winter of 2013 slash 2014.
So, you know, we ought to be a bit more mindful of our own history before we go around accusing the Russians of all sorts of malign behavior.
All right, so now, the announcement, according to the Associated Press here, or actually I have a NPR news reporter here.
Yeah, NPR Moscow correspondent reports that they have agreed to secure a Syrian ceasefire, open up a channel to talk about Ukraine, start a working group on cyber security, and name new ambassadors.
So, I don't know.
None of that sounds too bad.
Let's start with the Syrian ceasefire.
Do we know what that means yet?
Who's ceasing fire there?
I don't think that a Syrian ceasefire deal, while welcome, is feasible given the fact that Trump has appointed virulent anti-Iran hawks to his cabinet.
So, while it seems like a good idea right now, and I suppose it is, given the obsession that Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster have over Iran, I really don't think that the prospects for a ceasefire in Syria to take hold.
With regard to Ukraine, there's a very troubling piece of news that was reported today that the Trump administration has appointed Kirk Volker of the McCain Institute to be their special envoy for the Ukraine crisis.
So, if that's true, I don't really expect there to be much chance of a good outcome there as well.
Yeah, well, so you mentioned that, and I guess this is the context that everybody on liberal Twitter is certainly missing.
It's just the same as if it was Iraq war coverage or Syria war coverage or anything else.
History always began yesterday, and no prior context seems to matter.
And even though these media stars, they must know that they are completely ignorant, that they didn't cover the real story last time, so they don't know what it is today, but they don't care.
So, they talk about Ukraine, for example, as though, well, everybody knows Russian aggression, Russian aggression, evil Russia invaded Ukraine.
They seized the Crimean Peninsula, which sounds pretty violent, right, and started some terrible war there.
And, you know, I get it, shirts and skins, and we're on this side.
We live in North America, so we're on America's side, all this going on.
And yet, what about the truth?
What about what's really going on in Ukraine and who really started that fight?
You mentioned American intervention there in the winter of 2013, 2014.
Can you explain that to people who, you know, might not know about the history of American and Russian relations before the last accusation they heard?
Right.
Liberal Twitter tends to start the narrative of the Ukraine crisis in the middle of the story.
This actually all began over a trade agreement, the dispute over whether or not Ukraine should sign an association agreement with the European Union.
And Ukraine's then democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, decided that it was in his political interests and in the interests of the country not to go through with the EU agreement.
Instead, he accepted a, I believe, $15 billion loan from the Russian Federation.
This sparked massive protests in the capital of Kyiv.
But these protests were egged on by American officials and American elected officials like John McCain, Senator Chris Murphy, and the American ambassador to Ukraine, Jeffrey Pyatt, and the Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland.
So when you begin the narrative with the Russian support for the rebels in the East, you're leaving out quite a bit.
And certainly, when it comes to Crimea, people are almost entirely ignorant of the history of the peninsula, why it was granted to Ukraine in the 50s by Khrushchev, how Yeltsin bungled the union agreement in late December of 1991.
So there's a very complex history there.
Crimea always has been almost totally Russian, and the vast majority of the people there are quite pleased to have returned into the Russian fold.
Yeah, you know, I talked with Ray McGovern, and he talked about meeting with a group, and how they were having, it was a church group, and they were having all the children, I don't know where they got this from, local news channel or something, they were having all the children make some art project to shame Putin, to say, don't you know that it says in the Bible that killing is wrong?
And Ray said, well, what's this about?
And they said, well, it's about, you know, the Russian invasion of Crimea.
And Ray asked them, well, do you know how many people died in the Russian invasion of Crimea?
And they said, well, we don't know.
Thousands?
Hundreds?
Zero.
And he said, would you believe no one died?
That there was no invasion at all?
You could call it a seizure, I guess, but one where they were, the people there were glad to go along, as you said, you know, the Crimean Peninsula goes back under Russian control to, you know, certainly the 18th century.
And so, you know, they were floored.
All they knew was, you know, Putin is the devil, according to TV.
He did something horrible.
We're all against it.
And unless you're lucky enough to have Ray McGovern, of all people, stumble into your church group, this is what you're left to believe.
There's nobody else to correct it.
Except you and me.
Yeah, I mean, this points to another problem with the mainstream media.
Someone like Ray McGovern has deep expertise in intelligence matters and in Russia in particular.
He is a true, actual, literal Russian expert.
He is never, and I mean never, on MSNBC, CNN, or Fox.
So instead, these outlets put on people like David Korn and Joy Reid, and they present themselves as foreign policy experts knowledgeable in Russian matters when they have absolutely no worldly idea what they're talking about.
Right.
In fact, David Korn is one that I was thinking of from this morning on Twitter, tweeting out pictures of, look, Trump and Putin warmly greeting each other.
It looks like Trump pats Putin on the back and says, good job, Putin, or something.
Look, a handshake.
And we're just, all day long, we're supposed to be terrified of this.
This is supposed to all be an indication of something going terribly wrong.
And you know, I'm sorry, I'm lecturing everyone else on, and I guess you on your own interview here, but I know you feel the same way about it.
It's just crazy to me that for a guy who is nothing but flawed, I mean, we're talking about Donald Trump.
He's horrible on everything.
As president, he's horrible on virtually everything.
And the one thing that gives him a comparative advantage over the establishment in D.C., it's not trade deals or anything like that.
He's horrible on those, too.
It's that he's a little bit less worse on Russia.
This is the one thing, you can't even call it redeeming because it's nowhere near enough to redeem the man.
But he's a little bit less worse.
And that's the one thing that everybody targets him for.
The liberals are now the McCarthyites.
I saw a thing just a little while ago where Glenn Greenwald is being accused of reporting directly to Putin.
Everybody knows that.
The Intercept is also a Russian plot.
The scholar Timothy Snyder that wrote Bloodlands was tweeting out last night that, well, of course, the NRA wants Americans to all kill each other because the NRA is a pro-Russia organization, as though supporting gun rights means supporting everyone killing each other.
And then from there, too, because it's all a KGB plot.
I mean, what in the world?
I mean, the first thing you mentioned, Snyder, I would urge Snyder to read his own work.
In Bloodlands, Snyder showed quite convincingly how Ukraine's, rather, how should we put this dark history in the Second World War, and how that covers politics in that country to this day.
I don't know what happened to the Timothy Snyder, who of, when was it, 2010, who wrote Bloodlands, but it's been a remarkable transformation.
The stuff with Greenwald, that's of a piece with everything, with liberal Twitter.
You can't make the case, you can't make a rational case that the United States and Russia have certain security interests in common without being smeared.
Professor Stephen F. Cohen has been repeatedly smeared for making the case.
I've been smeared.
I'm sure you have as Putin apologists and tools of the Kremlin.
That's just the way it goes in this really insane atmosphere that has prevailed since, at least last summer, certainly since the beginning of the onset of the Ukraine crisis in early 2014.
One friend of mine who has been active in think tanks and journalism for a long time compared the atmosphere now to the atmosphere in the run-up to the Iraq war, when there were only a few voices questioning the WMD case, and as a result, they had their patriotism questioned, if not their sanity.
So we have a nasty, the establishment has a nasty habit of trying to marginalize and alienate people who are basically making an anti-war case.
And that's really the heart of the case.
And I find it deeply puzzling for someone who's not, I mean, someone like myself, who's nominally, I suppose, a Democrat, that many on the left are perfectly okay with endless imperial wars.
Very puzzling.
I was having dinner last night with a friend of mine who was part of the Hillary campaign.
And this is a person who's a very experienced diplomat, a very bright person.
And she said to me that we know, as a matter of fact, that Jared Kushner took a $245 million loan from a KGB-connected bank.
And so I was quite taken aback by this, because it was the first I was hearing of it.
And I said, okay, well, and I consulted my phone, Googled, and it turns out that the KGB-connected bank that my friend was referring to is a little organization in Germany called Deutsche Bank.
So I tried to make the case that perhaps she was being led astray by the idea that Deutsche Bank, one of the largest and most reputable banks in the world, is somehow connected to the KGB.
But Democrats find themselves largely inhabiting a fact-free zone when it comes to the issue of Mr. Trump and Russia.
I have been struck over the past months that the very same people who pushed and pushed the fraudulent case for war in Iraq are the very same people who are now lionized as leaders of this so-called resistance.
It's the same folks.
It's the same folks.
It's Andrew Sullivan.
It's David Frum.
It's Jonathan Shade.
It's the whole crew from the old New Republic.
They are busy pushing this Russia conspiracy every bit as hard as they pushed the case for war with Iraq.
In terms of the allegations that the Trump campaign somehow colluded with the Russian government to steal the election, I think it's always worth pointing out that so far, on the record, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, Senate Intelligence Committee Member Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, Maxine Waters, legendary Democrat of California, and Steny Hoyer, the former Majority Leader of the House, Democrat of Maryland, have all publicly stated that they see no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Yet, day in and day out, a steady diet of this nonsense is being churned out on MSNBC and CNN, convincing millions of people that the Russians tilted the election for Donald Trump.
It defies belief.
From now on, that means anything he does to try to get along with Russia will be painted as some kind of treason, as they're doing today.
Oh, look, Putin has us right where he wants us, is what the consensus is among the media people.
That's exactly the case that Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the USSR, Jack Madlock, made in comments to the Washington Post yesterday, that all of this hysteria is serving to box in the president, and it's tying his hands.
And as you say, Trump is pretty awful on everything, but he at least has a modicum of common sense when it comes to dealing with Russia.
Well, and the thing is, too, is that, you know, a year ago, I thought that, you know, I mean, obviously, communism and the Soviet Union are both dead and long gone.
But in essence, this amounts to red baiting.
Oh, you're under the control of the Kremlin.
And the Democrats were, of course, rolling this out last summer during the campaign.
And I was saying, look, this is just never going to stick.
Because first of all, he's a Republican, which means he's to the right of the left.
I mean, what are you going to do?
And then secondly, he's literally a skyscraper tycoon from Manhattan.
He's the epitome of American crony capitalism.
And in all the good and bad ways that you could, you know, figure, he is red, white and blue as can be.
He's as American as can be.
He's been a symbol of Ronald Reagan yuppie-ism for my entire lifetime, Donald Trump.
So the idea that somehow he's disloyal and he's really in the pocket of the Reds or the Kremlin or the same old kind of McCarthyite smear, I thought, you know, that's just never going to stick.
And in fact, he won the election anyway.
Hillary Clinton you know, directly said he is a puppet of Vladimir Putin in the debate to his face.
And he was just like, meh.
And the American people, hey, she's still lost.
And anyway, though, but now after, I guess, a solid year of this, people are starting to give in and that, you know, I guess it's true.
They keep saying it.
Yeah.
I mean, it's also little noted that Mrs. Clinton outspent Mr. Trump two to one.
She didn't visit the Midwestern states that swung the election.
Yeah.
Of course, there's a new study out.
Did you see the new study that says that it was the counties, especially in those states that suffered the most casualties in the Iraq and Afghan wars were the ones that turned out for Trump because they saw her as more of a hawk.
That's an extraordinarily important study.
And as far as I can tell, the only outlets that have mentioned it is the Libertarian Reason magazine.
I haven't seen any other coverage.
And Mondo Weiss coverage, too, but yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
So two, not exactly, you know, these aren't exactly, they're not exactly CNN, right?
I mean, this is a new- Well, you can't blame Putin for that, right?
You'd have to blame her vote for the Iraq war and her ownership of the regime change in Libya in 2011.
So best to just ignore that.
There was a time where that was going to be the centerpiece of her campaign, of course, but didn't quite work out that way.
Think of the effect that this is having on American public opinion, right?
In March, CNN released a survey that found that 34% of people view Russia as a, quote unquote, very serious threat.
That's up, according to the poll, up 13 points from last year.
I mean, that's extraordinary.
51% of Democrats believe that Russia is a very serious threat.
So this is having an effect on public opinion.
It's having a horrible effect on political discourse.
And it is in effect tying the administration's hands when it comes to Russia.
I can't help but wonder if that is part of the reason why Trump and Tillerson appointed a hardcore anti-Russia hawk, Kurt Volker, to be the Ukraine crisis envoy.
Yeah.
Tell us more about him.
Volker was the NATO ambassador under George W. Bush.
He's a neocon's neocon.
He's been involved with the McCain Institute.
He is 100% for democracy promotion, regime change.
He's a longtime European policy hand.
And he's, I mean, if you asked me to pick out, to pick the worst person to put in that position, he would be on my short list.
Well, now, all right.
McCain severely questioned the new deputy secretary of defense about whether he supported arming the Ukrainian government with what McCain, of course, calls defensive weapons, you know, rockets and tanks and stuff.
But yeah, no, so that's clearly a big priority for the hawkish senator.
But is there any indication of a change in policy there under Trump yet?
Because that's a real red line when it comes to the Russian point of view here, you got to imagine.
I mean, and in fact, can you address, do you know about the state of the war in the East right now?
There's still fighting going on right now in Donbass, isn't there?
Yeah, it's a low level.
It's basically a low level submarine conflict.
There hasn't been a big uptick in casualties over the past month or so, but there has been little to no progress in implementing the Minsk agreement.
And the Minsk agreement stipulates that Kiev ought to hold a vote on decentralization, and they haven't held it yet.
And let's see, why haven't they held it yet?
Because if they hold the vote, giving some autonomy to the East, guess what's going to happen?
Your friendly neighborhood right sector neo-Nazis are going to take to the streets again, and they're going to overthrow Poroshenko and probably hang him from a lamppost.
And they're not going to hold that vote because the oligarchs like Poroshenko, who's not a fighting man, he's a candy man, he's a candy factory owner.
He is not going to mess with right sector and the far-right neo-Nazis who have amassed quite a bit of power.
So much power, in fact, that the Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament is none other than Andrei Peruby, who founded the neo-Nazi political party right sector.
Mr. Peruby, he happened just to be in Washington a few weeks ago.
Who do you meet with?
John McCain.
It's really quite incredible.
Unbelievable, I had missed that.
Yeah, Peruby travels to Washington and is greeted you know, greeted with, well, they roll out the red carpet for Peruby.
It's unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
Wow, I really didn't know that.
I thought they were kind of trying to play that down since then.
But hey, why bother, right?
Right, right.
As long as you're against the Russians, you can be, you can be anything.
And you know, Nazis are okay, as long as they're, you know, as long as they're fighting.
Here's the thing, though.
I think if you're a critic, or if you're just anybody on a Sunday morning, just any average person wondering, you would think that the highest priority, of course, must be to make peace.
Whatever the problem is in Ukraine, that is some sort of proxy conflict between the US and Russia.
We better work that out, right?
That's not the highest priority of every person in Washington, DC.
There's some other priority higher than maintaining a peaceful relationship with Russia.
You bet there is.
Say it with me.
It's regime change.
They are, they, the overriding goal is to, is for there to be a change in leadership in Moscow for a lot of these people.
And so the overriding goal is to force Putin into a position where he would either have to resign, or there would, there would be some sort of, in their wild imaginings, this is never going to happen, of course, but, and you know, they are, they would love to see another so-called color revolution in Russia, just like had occurred in Georgia in 2003.
And in Ukraine, the first one was, I think, in 2004, that was the so-called orange color revolution.
So that's, that's sort of the big picture goal.
But it's really quite, it's really on the level of fantasy, because, as we all know, Putin has approval ratings upwards of 80%.
And those are not propaganda figures.
Those are real figures.
Yeah, well, it sounds crazy.
But then again, they write it in the Washington Post, right?
Carl Gershman said, hey, Putin, if you don't like it, you might be next.
Right.
Back in the fall of 2013.
Right.
That was a point that Brzezinski used to make repeatedly as well.
Amazing stuff.
All right.
Listen, I really appreciate your time on the show again, James.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is James Carden from The Nation magazine, and he also is the executive editor of the Center for East-West Accord.
That is at eastwestaccord.com.
It's the most important project in the world.
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