8/12/21 Ray McGovern on the History of US-Russia Relations and the Threat of a New Cold War

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.
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Okay, guys, on the line, I've got Ray McGovern.
Now, for 27 years, he was an analyst at the CIA, and he was, in fact, for a time the head of the Soviet division there, and he was the morning briefer for H.W. Bush when he was vice president under Ronald Reagan, and from time to time, I gather, briefed the president as well.
And then he retired after 27 years, and he spent the entire 21st century, so far at least, being an antiwar activist.
He's the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which has, since the Bush years, put out intelligence memos signed by numerous former intelligence officers warning why the presidents should know better than the terrible thing that they're about to do with, I'm pretty sure, 1,000 batting average for anybody who wants to go back and look at it.
And he's written a ton, mostly, I would guess, for consortiumnews.com and now for us, and we reprint everything he writes for whoever he writes it for over all these years, too, in his massive archive at antiwar.com, where he is now a regular contributor, I'm so proud to say.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
Very happy to have you here.
So, people can already tell, if they downloaded this, that this interview is going to be about two hours long, I mean, if we do it right.
And so, I let you know that in advance.
I want to do a real deep dive here, where essentially, time is not of the essence, and we can really go through and talk about the history of American and Russian relations in the post-Cold War era, which I guess means we have to start with the Cold War and your time as an intelligence officer or intelligence analyst there for the CIA.
Can you tell us, I think your career started with Camelot and all of that stuff, right?
It did, yeah.
I was one of the people who was attracted to come down to Washington after we heard Obama's inaugural saying, not Obama, John Kennedy's inaugural saying, you know, don't ask what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
I was in my senior year, majoring in Russian, of all things.
And long story short, I recruited myself to be slated to become a CIA analyst.
And they, they put off my, my call to that kind of duty until I were able to get my master's degree and then serve my two years as an army infantry intelligence officer.
So I began my actual analytic career with the agency in January of 1964, but I entered in April of 63.
So I had overlap with President Kennedy and was there, of course, when, when he was killed.
And then, so was everybody high-fiving around the office that day or how'd that go?
You know, we were in this very fancy training course.
Sorry.
Can't help myself.
Well, you know, I wish that were funny, but it isn't.
Let me tell you a little vignette.
We were in this training course for future leadership roles in the agency.
And we were, we were broken down into two groups.
One for the analysts, this was just a three-monther, and for the operations officer, about six months.
Okay.
Now, we analysts were treated to very senior people who gave, gave speeches and told us what was up with intelligence.
And one very vivid recollection I had came in about September, October, 1963, when an operations officer, I forget his name, but he was touted as a very experienced guy, talked to us about how terrible our president was, how awful, how he had no guts, how he couldn't support the Bay of Pigs operation.
He couldn't face down, he couldn't take care of Khrushchev when he should have during the Cuban Muscle Crisis.
It was just, it was a tirade.
And I'm saying to myself, wait a second, this is the president of the United States.
The current president of the United States, this guy is going AP on the Hershey Highway, as we say in the Bronx.
I mean, what goes on here?
Now I've tried to ask my old friends, no one can remember who this was, but I suspect it was one of the guys that was helpful or responsible for the assassination of John Kennedy.
I say that advisedly.
That's not for sure.
You know, usually I have some better evidence than that, but it was so stark and so memorable that, you know, it may have been E. Howard Hunt, for God's sake, because where we were is where they put out people to pasture or at least to cool off for a couple of years where he briefed us.
So that's about as, as, uh, as close as I come to a personal recollection of having to do with someone who was actually involved in the assassination, maybe.
Okay.
There's one other thing that I know quite well, and that is I worked for a fellow named Janny, J-A-N-N-E-Y.
We knew him as Fred.
His real name was Winstar.
Now his son, to his great credit, has written a book.
It's called Mary's Mosaic.
And he devoted his life's blood to this book.
And it's a detective's kind of thing.
And it reads like a novel, but it's happens to be real because his, his father was involved in the coverup of the murder of one of John Kennedy's lovers.
Her name was Mary Meyer.
She was killed on the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath, uh, just a couple of months after Kennedy himself was killed.
And what do you know, but that, uh, uh, high agency officials broke into her house immediately after she was killed in, in search for a diary at which might've been very explosive, which might have revealed who in fact was in charge of this.
Now, Janny, Janny was my boss.
He was head of the Sino-Soviet area in the analytic division.
And when I came in, in January of 64, he was a guy who never had a smile.
And you know, I'm, I'm re-imagining why, but, uh, this is his father and he is, he is testifying or writing in his book, uh, how he saw his father participate in the coverup of whoever did Mary Meyer in.
And, uh, it's an incredible book.
It's based on fact.
You ought to read it.
It's called Mary's Mosaic.
All right.
So then the idea would be, and I'm not sure if I buy this right, but I'll hear you out on this part.
The idea is that after the Cuban missile crisis that Kennedy said, all right, these Air Force lunatics are going to get us all killed if I don't make a major diplomatic breakthrough with the Reds here and wanted to really end the Cold War and gave a great speech at American University and all this Oliver Stone hypothesis, kind of a thing.
I'm not sure if I buy it.
I think I make not the same mistake, but the sort of slip of the tongue that you made there in calling Jack Kennedy Obama, because that's all he ever was, right?
A little bit more hopeful Hillary Clinton for the voters out there, but otherwise the same and not worth killing from their point of view, you know, but maybe he really was going to take their Cold War away from them.
Is that what you believe?
Well, someone asked me that yesterday, wasn't John Kennedy a cold warrior?
And I said, yes, of course he was.
And then he got into office.
And then he saw what the CIA could do in mousetrapping him into trying to have a have his own forces invade Cuba and depose Castro.
Now, Allen Dulles assured John Kennedy that, you know, with this operation that had already been approved by Eisenhower, this is going to go flawlessly, we'll get on the beach and the people in Cuba are going to have an uprising and they'll depose Castro.
Now that was made out of whole cloth.
And Kennedy said, you know, I don't know, I don't know if you're right about that, but just just remember this.
I am not going to introduce U.S. armed forces.
I'm not going to use our Air Force or Army or anything like that to rescue your guys if they get into trouble.
Just realize that, OK, now we know from coffee stained notes on Allen Dulles's desk after he died that he had written a note which said, this is virtually a quote, when the president realizes that the enterprise will fail without active involvement of the Air Force, he will be politically required to come to our aid.
In other words, just get on the beach, guys, and the president will have no option other than to support us.
So Kennedy knew he was mousetrapped.
Now Allen Dulles was part of the establishment, really, really a part of the establishment.
His brother was the secretary of state.
They had their banking and corporate followers and all.
So Kennedy waited a while.
He did say in a remark to a neighbor that he'd like to break the CIA into a hundred pieces and scatter it to the winds.
But he waited several months and then he removed Allen Dulles.
And next thing you know, we have the Cuban Missile Crisis in August, September, October of 62.
And the military wanted to use this as, you know, as Dan Ellsberg says in his book, you know, they want to use this to to nuke not only Russia, but China and accept several hundred million casualties and, you know, in the tens of millions for the US.
So Kennedy really thought they were crazy and said so.
Now, when when that crisis died down and one of the reasons we all can talk today is that Kennedy was a real smart guy.
OK.
And so he said with these troglodytes, with these, you know, Air Force generals eager to use their weaponry, I need someone like, well, Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, who had just come back from Moscow and could talk out of his rich experience dealing with the Russians.
So, for example, when those two messages came in from Khrushchev, one really, really bellicose and the other pretty much moderate, the Air Force said, OK, this is it.
The flag is up.
Let's get them.
And Thompson said, look, look, yeah, this is easy.
If you've got two messages, just ask, just answer the moderate one.
The fiery one was probably written by Khrushchev with the generals like you guys hovering over his over his shoulders.
Answer the mild one.
And that's what Kennedy did.
And we still escaped that that embargo with a miracle because there was one Soviet naval captain on a torpedo that prohibited the two other captains on that on that submarine from firing their nuclear torpedoes at the U.S. fleet.
They were out of contact with Moscow.
The other two said, let's do it anyway.
The ranking one said, no, we're not going to do it.
That could have led to, you know, a real conflagration.
So.
So, OK, so you got Kennedy going through all this.
And then he and Khrushchev have developed this relationship.
And they both feel that, wow, you know, it's it's on us to prevent what almost happened just now.
So he speaks at American University and then he says, you know, let's do a limited test ban treaty.
And you know, Congress said, no, no, with those Soviets, no, no, no.
Well, politically, he arranges it.
So the limited test ban treaty goes into effect a couple of months later.
And then what does he do?
He says, well, let's look at Vietnam.
Let's see if we really need to persist there.
Now, one thing I hope you know, Scott, is that he issued two directives, that is, Kennedy did one that said we're going to withdraw one thousand troops from Vietnam by the end of the year.
That's 1963.
And half of the bulk of half of the rest of them by the end of 1965.
Those were directives.
Now, how did he get that done?
He sent out his top general advisor and sent him instructions as to what to write when he's on his way back in Honolulu.
And what he wrote facilitated the decision that Kennedy would would do.
Now, that's fact.
We know it.
It's in a couple of books, but not many.
And what was the reaction among the joint chiefs?
You know, they have been called appropriately a sewer of deceit.
Those joint chiefs under Kennedy.
And that's George Ball, the deputy secretary of state, by the way, calling him that.
So what does he do?
He maneuvers around them and and gets this this this campaign going.
And he's talking to Castro through an intermediary and he's talking to Khrushchev, but he's not letting the CIA monitor what he's talking with Khrushchev and neither is the military.
So they got this little cabal together.
The best account of all this comes in James Douglas's book, JFK and the Unspeakable.
If you haven't read it, I strongly suggest it is most persuasive.
It puts the thing all together to the degree it can be put together.
And bottom line, of course, is there was there was a conspiracy.
There was conspiracy led by Alan Dulles and the military that thought that Kennedy was soft on communism.
He was dealing with Khrushchev and with Fidel Castro, mind you, behind everybody's back.
And he was doing all terrible things.
He was going to leave Vietnam to the communists.
OK, but so.
All right.
Clearly, he's established motive in your mind there.
But does he make the connection to Oswald and the kill shots and all these things?
Well, put it all together.
Yeah.
Oswald plays a role here, of course.
But he's a he's a creature of the CIA.
He has visits to Mexico City and all are reconstructed.
It's really quite an amazing feat.
Oliver Stone, of course, is very high on it and others.
So the fact that it didn't get reviewed in this country, well, that speaks volumes to it's that it didn't get reviewed for the same reason that Donald Trump was not able to follow the congressional legislation that required him to release the remainder of the CIA and FBI documents having to do with the assassination of John Kennedy.
You may recall three years ago, Trump got up very proudly and he says, OK, this is the day.
Congress requires me to to release the rest of those FBI and CIA documents and I'm going to do it.
Then he gets up in the afternoon, about 330, he says, you know, the CIA and the FBI tells me that I can't release the rest of those documents.
They're too sensitive.
So what I said this morning is not operative.
We're going to we're going to revisit it in six months.
So McGovern makes a little note in his diary, six months, you know, six months comes.
Nobody asks, did Lee?
Does McGovern ask?
Well, he would have asked if he had access to any of these people.
So that's where it stays.
Those documents, despite the law that says they should be released, remain in the bowels of the CIA and the FBI.
And you know, here it is.
How many years?
Sixty three.
Do the math.
It's 2021.
Right.
And they still can't be released.
Wow.
What does that tell you?
You know what?
I got to bring this up, man.
I'm only partially convinced, but you should watch this thing on Amazon Prime video.
I'm pretty sure it's called a smoking gun, something like that.
It's essentially the it doesn't address any of what you're talking about, by the way.
It's just completely separate from that.
Briefly, it makes the case that the kill shot that blew the front part of his head off was not from Oswald's rifle, but that I'm spoiling this for everyone.
If you haven't seen it, spoiler alert, it was a Secret Service agent accidentally shot him when he lost his balance and he had pulled out an AR-15 or an M-16 from the floorboard of the follow car behind the president to return fire against whoever was shooting at him and then lost his balance and accidentally pulled the trigger.
And that's why the entry wound fits, I guess, a .223, but wouldn't fit.
I forgot the size of Oswald's rifle was was a bigger diameter than the entry wound.
But also it would explain why it was a fragmentation round that blew his head off that or out that way, rather than just passing straight through, as the original shot that went through the president's throat and hit Connolly did.
And so he says first shot hit the street.
Second shot went through the president's throat and hit the governor.
The so-called magic bullet, which he says was not magic.
It was just that Connolly had turned in his seat.
And that was why the bullet lines up.
And then the third shot was dumbass, the hungover Secret Service agent who accidentally fired and shot the president in the head.
And they don't have that's not in the Zapruder film, but there is a still picture of him with a rifle like in the air from right near that moment.
And the trajectory lines up with the back of the president's head, unlike from the Grassy Knoll or from the Book Depository.
And there's witnesses who say they saw the first bullet hit the street and smelled gunpowder at street level as well.
Anyway, it's definitely worth looking at, which it doesn't negate any of this.
Like if that if Alan Dulles put Oswald in that window, it wouldn't change this.
Although if you just wanted to do like a Occam's razor thing, this would explain a lot of the cover up.
Right.
If you know, if the Secret Service accidentally killed the president, then they might shut this autopsy down early without it actually going all the way back to Dulles.
You know what I mean?
That kind of thing.
I think if you read Douglas's book, you'll see the painstaking detail that he goes into to indicate how it was shot from the Grassy Knoll, so to speak.
And you know, I asked Jim, he's a friend of mine, actually.
He's a real, really good researcher.
I said, Jim, do you think LBJ was involved in this?
And he said, I can't establish that he was involved in it, but I believe that he knew about it.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, we should move on from this.
I mean, I got to say, I always thought Alan Dulles did it ever since I was a kid and the movie came out.
Seems like he's the most likely suspect for being the ringleader behind it or whatever.
But I've never had that proven to my satisfaction.
But I also haven't cared to research it that much because there's so much contrary information.
I just never wanted to devote the time to sussing all that out.
But anyway, regardless of who killed Jack Kennedy, you know, after him came the escalation in Vietnam, of course, but then was detente under Nixon.
And you know, it's been, you know, many years since I read this book, but it's the Yankee Cowboy War by good old, what's his name, where I'm pretty sure that's where he makes the case that the impeachment of Nixon was a coup, that that was revenge against him for getting out of Vietnam in the same sort of fashion.
Not quite Dallas style, but that that was the reason that the establishment decided to take him down was as revenge for pulling out of Vietnam.
What do you think about that?
Oh, I don't I don't believe that's to be the case.
There were ample reasons for for what happened happening.
And you know, I was you know, I was around then and I saw the fine line that Dick Helms and his deputies and all had to tread.
But I don't really believe for a minute that they were involved in the Nixon impeachment.
He tried to use them to cover up stuff.
And oddly, but effectively, Helms thought his first his first responsibility, his first duty was to protect the agency.
And so he really didn't cooperate with with Nixon.
But to say that he was responsible for for some of the things that happened, that's that's a new one for me.
And let me just say one thing about conspiracy theories.
You know, to my mind, this really got this label got legs when Alan Dulles was appointed by Lyndon Johnson to the Warren Commission to investigate the killing of John Kennedy.
I mean, there are a lot of people around say, wait a second, conflict of interest.
I mean, the CIA is one of the suspects.
How are you going to let him run the Warren Commission?
Which is what he did.
He ran the Warren Commission.
Now, how did the government answer that?
They said conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory, conspiracy theory that was very, very well used in those in those circumstances.
And it's used today, of course, to debunk lots of other things that are legitimate questions like 9-11, legitimate questions like Russiagate and other things like that.
You say conspiracy theorists automatically you're tarred with a really ugly brush.
Yeah, well, I mean, the thing is to.
There are a lot of goofballs who believe a lot of goofy stuff and will leap to any conclusion that fits their preferred, you know, emotion or whatever the hell.
So there's got to be a word for it.
You're right that it's used a lot against legitimate critics, but it also there's a lot of shoe fits where kind of thing going on, too.
So I don't know.
But anyway, so and look, hey, there was a lot at stake, right, in in detente policy, which, you know, Team B, there's a conspiracy theory for you.
A bunch of neocons got hired by H.W. Bush under Gerald Ford to pretend that the Soviet Union was 10 feet tall.
And you've already told me the story before about how, you know, your bosses at CIA were the major co-conspirators in that one.
So whether they help sabotage Nixon or not, they did not want peace with the, you know, or any real lessening of the Cold War.
In fact, they would have kept it going into the 90s and the 21st century if they could have somehow.
Right.
You know, when you talk about they, you know, there's a fellow named Rumsfeld, who's no friend of mine, but he was running the White House at the time.
He and another fellow named Cheney, they were running Jerry Ford and they were a little afraid that this George H.W. Bush, that he had such credentials and such ties with important people, he might run for president sometime, whereas they wanted to.
OK, so how do you marginalize somebody like that?
You make them head of the CIA.
Once you head of the CIA, you can never become president, of course.
That's what Rumsfeld and Cheney thought.
They were running.
They were heading up the White House staff.
So here he is.
Here's George Bush comes out to Langley and for less than a year runs the CIA.
And then Rumsfeld puts the pressure on him and says, look, your guys are not telling the truth about how powerful the Russians are.
We know that they're 12 feet tall.
Your guys say they're only like six foot two.
OK.
And so we need a team B.
And now here's George H.W. Bush put in a really political straitjacket.
Is he going to reject team B?
Is he going to make himself liable for accusations from Rumsfeld and Cheney saying, look, this guy has fallen in with these pinko analysts there at the CIA.
They don't think the Russians are 12 feet tall.
Look what happened.
No, no.
He's going to, against all our advice, he's going to acquiesce and hope that he can control team B.
And he did sort of control team B to an extent.
But that was a political thing.
The the head of the CIA should never have agreed to it.
And had he not had presidential aspirations, George H.W. Bush would not have agreed to it either.
There was very, very serious analysis going on, showing that the the economy of the Soviet Union was not doing well at all.
And serious people were suppressed when Bill Casey came in under Reagan and chose Bobby Gates to be his head of analysis.
Then you couldn't really say anything but that the Soviet Union was hellbent on taking over the world, just like Stalin and the people like that.
So so that's that's how that happened.
Now, it's the work was still we were still able to do the work.
And when I was briefing Bush and Secretary Shultz, Secretary of State and Secretary Weinberger of Defense and a whole assortment of assistance to the president for National Security Affairs, half of whom ended up in jail because of Iran-Contra.
And later, I also briefed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as the vice president.
Now, I had a really good window into that and I could see, for instance, you might be interested in this, Scott, you know, Gorbachev came on the scene and he was different.
All he had to do is talk to people who had dealt with him before, like the Canadians.
They had dealt with him before.
And we could see on front pages of Pravda, extreme criticism of the of the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, for God's sake, the beginning of glasnost and perestroika.
And so we could see that is the honest analysts could see that this guy was the real deal.
He was different.
Now, what did Bill Casey, what did Bobby Gates say?
He's just a more clever communist.
Don't deal with him.
He's terrible.
We can't get any arms control with him.
Well, George Bush, I'm sorry, George Shultz, with a little help from George Bush, had to fight Weinberger and others off for about two years before Reagan would listen to George Shultz and say, OK, you go to Moscow, you talk to these guys, see if Gorbachev is different.
And he was.
Shultz proved that.
And the next thing you know, we have very, very interesting and very, very unusual, unique arms control agreements.
And when I say unique, I mean a whole class of intermediate and low range nuclear missiles as a so-called intermediate treaty.
There are no scaly buses in 1986 in 1986.
You know, this was this destroyed our Pershing missiles already in place in in Western Europe and destroyed a whole class, the SS 20s intermediate range ballistic missiles in the Soviet Union.
They were all destroyed and they were all verified as being destroyed.
Scott Ritter and others went to the scene and watched them be blown up.
OK, this was this was Doverei, Proverei, trust but verify to the nth degree.
So this was possible to do, but only because these troglodytes like Casey and Gates were proven wrong.
And Shultz very patiently and very professionally, as he was a professional, persuaded Reagan that you could deal with these people.
And then, of course, when later on, when when Clinton came in, he reneged on the deal to prevent NATO from going eastward toward the Soviet Union, double the size of NATO, all of the new countries to the east of East Germany, despite the promises that George H.W. Bush had made.
And then, of course, George Bush, the lesser, the junior George W.
Bush got out of the cornerstone of strategic stability, the ABM treaty, which I had the privilege of being in Moscow for the signing because Jack Matlock and I had worked real hard on making it possible for Reagan when he I'm sorry for Nixon in this case, when he asked, hey, how about this deal?
Do you can we can we trust these people?
Can you verify this?
Suppose they cheat.
And we said, well, how soon would you have to know?
He said, well, two weeks.
So we went back to our experts and people running the satellites and all that stuff.
OK, we can do that.
You can trust.
We can verify.
Now, that was a that was a crowning achievement of intelligence.
And we needed to have the trust to make that work.
And with with Nixon and with Kissinger, we had developed that trust.
And so we signed the ABM treaty, which really by preventing the deployment of anti-ballistic missiles to the extent that no no side could think that they could make a preemptive strike and escape extreme retaliation.
That was stability.
That was 1972.
And it lasted for 30 years before George W.
Bush, under the influence of people like John Bolton, decided that we get out of that treaty.
Why?
Well, you tell me why.
All I know is that that was the cornerstone.
And the Russians really, really started to fear what may be in store.
And once the US just started violating all kinds of treaties, the other treaty that I mentioned that was unique, that that destroyed a whole class of intermediate nuclear missiles that, of course, was was left as well.
And so so there's there's no real structure for retaining or restraining arms.
And even though there's a so-called resumption of strategic arms talks now, nothing looks very promising.
And the Russians are are reconciled to the fact and Putin has pretty much said so that U.S. relations toward toward Moscow are pretty much formed by domestic politics here in the United States, that the the people with the power, what I call the military, industrial, congressional, intelligence, media, academia, think tank complex are in control.
And as long as they need an enemy, well, Russia is number one so far.
China is up and coming.
And that's a story in and of itself.
How Russia and China now have a virtual military alliance, whereas the U.S. is still thinking that we are exceptional, that we are indispensable.
Really strange.
Yeah, well, they are exceptional.
They can do whatever they want.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right now.
So on the timeline, you're getting ahead of things as far as the nuclear treaties and all that.
But I want to get back to that.
But I want to skip back, if we could, to the end of the Cold War under H.W. Bush.
Remind me again at what point you retired from the CIA.
I retired in early 1990.
It was a month or two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
East Europeans were starting to declare their own independence, the Baltics as well.
The Soviet Union was finished.
I had always wanted to work down in the inner city.
I had been volunteering down there.
And because I had served enough time overseas, I was entitled to to to retire at age 50.
And so I took advantage of that, clap myself on the back.
The main enemy, the Soviet Union, had fallen.
And now I can go do what I really want to do.
Yeah.
The other factor that prompted me to leave, of course, was that intelligence was beginning to be really politicized under Casey and Gates.
And as you know, it's gotten worse and worse still.
And I've seen my role and the role of other right thing, right thinking analysts as trying to kind of trying to monitor and trying to hold our former colleagues to the ethos of telling it like it is.
And we have failed miserably in that task.
That is, we veteran intelligence professionals for sanity.
However much we warned about Iraq, I was reading something I wrote back in.
Dang it, Ray.
I want to talk about H.W. Bush years here for a minute.
OK, yeah.
I want to hear from you about how they handled the breakup of the Soviet Union here.
And there's at least one major controversy.
I'm sure you'll think of many more interesting things about this time period here from the end of Reagan and into H.W. Bush, whether.
Oh, yeah, I guess it's two years into H.W. Bush before you quit there.
So you're watching really the not just the fall of the wall, but the total disillusion of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and all this stuff.
And Bush is, you know, this is the funny thing.
I forgot the numbers now.
I used to know the numbers for a little while there about the number of nukes that the U.S. and the Soviet Union dismantled.
Um, it by treaty in that right in that time period and how here this horrible bastard who I always hated in a way, in a quantifiable sense, he might be the greatest hero who ever lived in the sense of his effort to continue going over there to shake hands with Gorbachev and then with Yeltsin, even in the last days of his presidency at the very beginning of 19, I think in January of 93, at least December 92, I think even January 93, he's still going over there to sign even more nuke reductions with the new Russian government at that time.
But that wasn't the controversy.
The controversy, I was going to say, which I want to hear you mention that the controversial part.
And I got this from Jack Matlock himself, the second to last ambassador to the USSR on the show, has described this to me repeatedly, how that chicken Kiev speech by H.W. Bush warning against right wing nationalist separatist type factions in Ukraine was a very deliberate thing that the James Baker, George Bush policy was they wanted for the USSR in at least its most limited sense to them, meaning Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and I guess still the Central Asian republics, too.
They wanted for that to remain and they didn't want to see the red, white and blue flag over the Kremlin.
They wanted to still have the Soviet empire dominant, I guess, especially they were worried about what a bunch of Ukrainian Nazis might do.
And it was William Sapphire, the neocon hawk in The New York Times, who coined that the chicken Kiev speech where H.W. Bush said, listen, we're not going to support a bunch of right wing nationalist reaction here, so everybody cool it and all that.
But so Matlock told me that himself that they didn't want to see the final end of the USSR.
And then they were embarrassed when it fell apart anyway.
You talk about that and then talk about all the nuke treaty stuff I said, too, if you want.
Getting the very last, the big nuke reductions that they made in that time.
Sure.
Well, Jack Matlock is a good friend of mine.
We worked together, especially in the 70s and the 60s.
I've talked to him as well.
And of course, he's written what he just what you just recounted.
They were surprised.
They were really not wanting the former Soviet Union to fall apart.
It would suffice that the they were not as powerful as before.
And most important, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union pretty much had fallen apart, had sort of given up the dictatorial role that they had exercised since the 20s, 1920s.
More interesting is what how George Bush reacted to the fall of the Berlin Wall and what he put in play.
And this is easy to go through.
Berlin Wall fell November 1989.
Three weeks later, at George H.W. Bush's insistence, he met with Gorbachev on the island of Malta and he told him, look, we're really sorry about your troubles in Eastern Europe, but we're not going to dance on the Berlin Wall.
That's the way George Bush put it.
We're not going to jump up and down and take advantage.
That was his words as well.
Take advantage of your troubles.
OK, so he says to Gorbachev, look, and Matlock, of course, was there.
He says, look, we've got to work this thing out before it gets out of hand.
How soon can you can you receive my secretary of state, James Baker, and Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, the foreign minister, say?
Well, a couple of months.
OK, how about first week of February?
February 1990 now.
OK, so Baker goes to to Moscow and he deals with Gorbachev personally and also with Shevardnadze, his opposite number.
And he says, look, here's the deal.
We would like to have out of this commotion and this chaos in Central Europe, we'd like to have a reunited Germany.
Now, you know, anyone who knows about Russian history or Soviet history, you know, they must have known what a bitter pill that was.
Did they want a reunited Germany?
It's the last thing they want.
As a matter of fact, the first secretary general of NATO said the whole idea of NATO was to keep the Americans in, keep the Russians out and keep Germany divided.
OK, when I heard a serious discussion about a reunited Germany, I didn't want it either.
I spent five years in Germany.
You know, some of my best friends are German, but I didn't want a reunited Germany.
And the country that I come from only lost about 400,000 only 400,000 troops in World War Two.
The Russians, as most people know, lost 27 million people, not only troops, of course.
Twenty seven.
Imagine 27.
So here's Baker saying, hey, let's have a reunited Germany.
And so Gorbachev says that.
All right, well, you know, what's the what's the quo for that quid?
That's a big, big quid.
And Baker promises that if there's a reunited Germany, Germany will not have nuclear weapons, obviously.
It'd be under NATO.
And NATO would not move one inch eastward from what then was the East German border.
Solemn promise.
Was it written down?
It was not codified in a formal agreement.
And there were very good reasons for that.
The Germans weren't fully briefed on this.
They needed to agree to it.
There was a real delicate situation that Gorbachev faced.
Think about telling the Soviet citizens then.
Think about telling them, look, we're going to let Germany be reunited and we're going to pull out 20 divisions.
We have 20 divisions in East Germany, we're going to pull them home.
You know, it wasn't that long since World War Two.
Right.
So there was a big sales job that Gorbachev had to do.
But the main thing was, and I had this from one of Gorbachev's highest aides who was at all this, at all these negotiations.
The name is Viktor Kuvalvin.
OK.
And he told me about eight years ago when I was in Moscow, he said, look, Greg, we needed German buy-in.
The Warsaw Pact still existed, at least on the paper.
And most of all, he looked me straight in the eye and he says, most of all, Mr.
McGovern, we trusted you.
Now, as you know, Bill Clinton...
Haha, joke's on you.
Don't ever trust the Americans.
By the way, on this whole question of whether it's in writing or not.
And the thing is, it is in writing.
It's not a formal agreement signed and all of that kind of thing.
But they sort of, the way that they always talked about it was, well, you don't have it in writing as though it's only a matter of claims and memories.
But the George Washington University National Security Archive published all different kinds of notes and memoranda that talked about this, even if it wasn't a formal agreement between the nations.
There's your handshake right there on paper, at least.
Correct?
Well, of course.
Yeah.
The notes, the notes that were taken on the U.S. side, the German side especially, they all reflect this.
And some of them, some of them in translation, one, not one inch eastward.
Yeah, it was clearly a promise.
Now, it was not codified.
And so lawyers like James Baker or international legal people would not recognize it as any kind of agreement.
It needed to be signed.
Now, Gorbachev is extremely unpopular now, despite his responsibility for bringing pretty much freedom and democracy from the communist regime.
They hate him in Russia because he wasn't smart enough.
Well, he trusted the U.S. and they double-crossed him.
Now, how did they double-cross him?
When Bill Clinton was running for a second term, he was running against Bob Dole.
And somebody said, hey, you know, there's an awful lot of emigres from Poland and Czech Slovakia and Hungary and elsewhere, you know, in the Middle West, those key states.
And, you know, why don't you, they want to get in NATO.
Why don't you let them in NATO?
Well, long story short, NATO doubled in size from the original 12.
And now I think it's 31, for God's sake.
So what is it?
What is it for?
The Warsaw Pact is dwindled.
Now NATO is seeking a role in the Far East.
Give me a break.
That's the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
All right.
Now, so we talked earlier about conspiracy theories.
Now, during this time, I was in high school, which is only sort of an excuse.
But I was a total New World Order kook.
In other words, I was a huge fan of William Norman Grigg at the John Birch Society, and I never was a right winger on all the cultural stuff and all of that.
But the idea was that it's the evil Illuminati plot to create a one world federal government under the U.N. and sell out the U.S.
And there's a lot of kind of, you know, dissonance there about who's ruling who under this new coming empire.
But a major cornerstone of it was right there in The New York Times, kind of constantly the Bill Clinton Democrats saying that they want to bring Russia into NATO, too.
So to me, as a New World Order kook, I says, you see, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, man, they bring the Russians in and then you have the one white one world white army of the North, essentially.
And then the new enemy will be Islamic South Asia and all that, which, by the way, is how I stopped being a New World Order kook is because this wasn't Dick Cheney's agenda a few years later.
And in fact, I should have got through my thick skull by the time they bombed Kosovo over Yeltsin's dead body in 1999.
But I'm a little bit slow on the uptake sometimes, Ray, you understand.
But there was a time.
And in fact, I just finally the other day, which is what gave me the idea to talk to you about all this.
I finally sat down and watched the Putin interviews with Oliver Stone.
And one of the things they talk about in there is how Vladimir Putin says that he made this proposal to Bill Clinton and Bill Clinton said, yeah, let's do it.
And I remember they had the Russian NATO Council where that was the point.
And so it was Bill Clinton's guy, Strobe Talbot, who was, I guess, the main proponent of NATO expansion, but also then to include Russia.
But then that sure didn't work out.
And I think it's because more right wing hawks in America ended up saying there is no way in hell, as I think Putin explains this to Stone in the interview to that.
Look, if they let us in, then they'd have to give us a say.
And they don't want to.
You know, they're by far the dominant power.
The Americans are by far the dominant power in Europe.
But if they're going to let us into NATO, we're going to have to have a significant say on the policy of NATO.
And they don't want to give up that much dominance.
So they would never want to do it.
So then the same people who said that NATO expansion is harmless because we don't mean the Russians any harm.
In fact, we're thinking about bringing them into NATO, too, ended up just ringing Russia with essentially enemies, you know, bringing, you know, their neighbors into their at least most adversarial, most powerful military alliance against them.
And so possibly even inadvertently.
Right.
But so how much of that do I have right or wrong there about anyone's intention to ever bring the Russians themselves into NATO and how that all kind of fell apart and all that?
Well, what I remember pretty vividly was George H.W. Bush speaking in West Germany at the time saying, we need a Europe whole and free from Lisbon to Vladivostok.
OK, from Portugal to the far reaches of the eastern part of the Soviet Union.
Now, he repeated that endlessly, and there was a big push under George H.W. Bush to say, well, you know, look, Yeltsin's a good guy.
The Soviet military have fallen apart.
They're letting Wall Street in there.
Maybe, maybe, maybe Russia could have a relationship with NATO at least, or maybe even join.
Well, this cut across the grain, of course, because the military industrial complex needs an enemy.
And not only that, but Yeltsin wasn't going to be around forever.
And there were limits to how much plunder Wall Street and other corporate entities in the United States could do before they were finished with Russia.
Do you know, Scott, you probably do, that when Yeltsin took over during the years between during the years between 1991 and 1995, the average age, the average mortality, well, let's put it this way.
Men in Russia lived six years less during those four years that I just mentioned.
In other words, if 62 was the average age that they died, then it was six minus six, 62 minus six.
There was hunger, there was destitution, and it all had to do with these Harvard guys that they let in there.
And Yeltsin being as drunk as he was, and we helping him be reelected because he was such a pushover, and Clinton just glorying and all this stuff.
So we took advantage of Russia.
And Putin was there to watch all this, OK?
And the real miracle came when, for some strange reason, Yeltsin appointed Putin to pretty much take over, or Putin finally did take over.
Now, that's how I remember things.
And Putin saw the disarray, saw how the oligarchs, not only in Russia, but the oligarchs at Harvard and Wall Street, what they had done to the country.
And to his credit, they rebuilt the country and put it back on a stable basis.
And then, of course, the military industrial complex had a real enemy that they could, whoop, the Russian army is rearmed, and they are rearmed to the teeth now.
And that's the new situation, Scott.
I think that exceeded our capability in certain key strategic areas.
And that's really big, not to even mention the fact that they have an ally now with China.
Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq War III, Yemen, and all the special operations wars throughout Africa in the aftermath of the war in Libya.
It's all there for you.
It might change a friend's mind.
Enough already.
Time to end the war on terrorism at enoughalreadybook.net.
Need a new website?
Go to expanddesigns.com slash scott and save $500.
Hey guys, check out Listen and Think audiobooks.
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Now, so I wanted to mention this.
I'm not sure you must have read this before.
I guess my question for you is, is this the best thing to read about this?
It's the best thing I know of.
Is the testimony of Ann Williamson before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services, 1999, the U.S. House.
It's called The Rape of Russia.
And I think it was supposed to come out as a book, Contagion, the Betrayal of Liberty, which I think never came out or something like that.
I'm not sure.
That was the best I could ever find out about.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Because I'm not sure if I do.
I don't know what you're talking about, but it sounds real.
The title you would use is exactly what happened.
And it's no surprise to me.
Just to make that real clear, the Harvard boys and all this, we're talking about the ultimate case of kicking the Russians while they're down in the Bill Clinton years, the shock therapy and all that.
And, you know, this is a hell of a thing.
When when life expectancy goes down and the standard of living goes down that much during the transformation from communism to capitalism, something's going seriously wrong.
And it's not really capitalism at all.
Right.
It's just gangsters liquidating entire industries and running off to Israel with all the money.
Right.
Well, it's rampant capitalism, unrestrained capitalism, you know.
Well, I mean, they just they just turn entire public owned resources over to some guy to do with whatever he wants, mostly like ex-KGB guys and stuff.
That's not exactly capitalism.
That's more of just grand theft, industrial economy, basically, you know.
Yeah.
But it was, you know, it was a far cry from what what all the Russians had experienced before.
You know, as bad as the Russian system was, the communist system, the basic needs of the people were pretty much met, including old people, including people who were who were needing education and so forth.
So for all this stuff to fall apart, you know, whether it was capital, whatever you want to call it, it was plunder and it was something that they all experienced.
And, you know, it's mostly still alive now, those folks, the ones that didn't perish in those first years.
And the notion that that Bill Clinton sent an army of people in to rescue Yeltsin in 1996.
He was he was going to lose that election hands down.
And they sent an army of pure people and everything.
And they turned the election in favor and Time magazine ran a cover story with Yeltsin with a drunken nose and an American flag.
There was no there was no shame to it.
That's what we did.
We put our guy back in and the Russians got four more years of this this drunk.
So we took advantage of them.
Americans don't know that.
But this is part of the background as to why Putin with a strong arm pretty much put things back into shape and why Putin is so popular.
Now, I've been in Russia a couple of times recently.
And the surly, the, you know, the old manner that you met in restaurants and in shops and so forth is no longer there.
Instead, you go to a souvenir place and the young young girls say, look, oh, you want you want one of these?
They're for free.
And it's it's it's Putin on the on the cup.
And it says, well, in Russia, it says it's only usually easy.
In other words, the most the most polite person.
And the other part back of the cup has an army soldier such as was in Ukraine, in Crimea at the time when they went around closing down Ukrainian officers taking over.
There were 20,000 Soviet troops or Russian troops, I should say, in Crimea at the time they went around and in a nonviolent way, close down stuff before the the plebiscite that the people in Crimea voted to rejoin Russia.
Now, let me just tell you a little vignette here.
Wait, but you're skipping ahead by 20 years in our story here.
So which which way are you going with this vignette back to where we were?
Because you're on a tangent now.
A tangent to a vignette.
How ill-informed Americans are.
Let me let me do that.
So I mentioned it.
Just remember where we were, because I want to say I'm happy for you tangents.
I love them all.
But also, I want to stick to the chronology, too, because there's a lot in the meantime that we got to try to include.
All right.
Let's go back to the chronology.
Well, go ahead with your vignette.
I didn't mean to be a jerk.
I just want to make sure we don't get too far gone.
Here I am in Washington at a rather progressive audience.
There's a professor, a woman talking about how terrible the Russians are and how they invaded Ukraine.
And then she says, you know, my son came from he's only nine years old.
He came from Friday school and he had done this poster and it says Putin, stop killing people.
And I looked around and everybody was sort of smiling and and I raised my hand like I usually do.
And I said, well, what was the reference there?
And she said, Crimea, of course.
You know, when you invaded Crimea, I said, well, how many people did Putin kill?
Oh, probably thousands, hundreds at least.
And I looked around and nobody else.
And I said, would you believe zero?
No, I can't believe that.
And everybody else stroking their head.
No, no, no.
Well, you better believe it, because that's the truth.
One person got wounded.
But these these green men in uniforms from the Sevastopol, a naval base in Crimea, went around closed.
They they went to these establishments there in Crimea and they said, now, look, we know you have no orders from Kiev.
We have orders from from Moscow.
Please, we don't want any trouble.
Would you just step aside?
And that's how it went.
Now, that's how ill informed.
This was a progressive.
Well, it doesn't really matter if it's progressive or not.
They just couldn't.
It was beyond their ken that Putin was not a killer, killer, and that he didn't invade Crimea, that he that he didn't invade the rest of Ukraine.
People still say the Russians invaded Ukraine.
It's it's deplorable, the amount of ignorance as a result of our mainstream media.
Yeah, I tell you what, I mean, I'm sure you saw the poll the other day where more people wrongly believe that Iran has nukes than correctly understand that Israel does have them.
Just as another example of, boy, the the other world that people live in here now.
So in the rise of Putin here is very important.
Now, I got a couple of sources, but I'd like to have some more.
I mean, when I hear Putin explain it to Oliver Stone, sounds right to me.
But also there's a pretty extensive report in The Washington Post about the Saudi role, which just has the CIA in invisible brackets all over it anyway.
It sure seems like.
And there's some documents from the Stratford leak where they talk about CIA working with the Saudis about this.
And then Colleen Rowley, the former FBI lawyer who could have stopped September 11th if they let her do her job there for Minneapolis, the lady who busted Zacharias Moussaoui.
She wrote a piece for Consortium News years back where she talked a lot about this, too.
And I think.
Oh, and that horrible jerk, John Schindler, actually wrote a book about I.
Well, I guess it's more about Bosnia, but I think I was told it has some of this in it, too.
But I guess I don't know that for sure.
Anyway, what I'm talking about is.
U.S. support for the Chechen insurgency against Russia in the late 1990s and how for all the complaints about Vladimir Putin, isn't he blowback from American support for that war?
And he was brought in to I if I remember it right.
I'm going from memory here.
I think I haven't read about this part of this aspect of it recently or anytime, maybe.
I mean, if I remember it right from back then, right.
He was brought in to lead or to be in charge of the both Chechen wars in 97, then again in 99.
And that was really what solidified his place in at the top of Russian politics to then get picked by Yeltsin to replace him on the way out at the end of 99.
Do I remember both of those aspects correctly by your reckoning, do you think?
Uh, yes, I think you do.
And I think that the Chechnya, the revolt there was almost certainly supported by people who wanted to support separatism and and give Moscow a bloody nose.
So, you know, that goes without saying.
That's what we do.
That's what the National Endowment for Democracy and also the recruitment we do among that among favorable Muslims, what we do.
So, yeah, it's no surprise that.
And of course, you're right in saying that Putin really, really took hold then.
And, you know, it was pretty horrible, but he put down the insurrection.
And then, boy, was this something else.
I still remember New Year's 99.
Yeltsin resigns.
Putin named to replace him.
Election in three months.
Ha ha ha.
OK, well, that's pretty much a fait accompli.
This is the same guy that's been essentially in power ever since then.
And, you know, it's interesting in those Oliver Stone interviews, you can see a little bit of dissonance for poor Oliver Stone because he's pretty far to the left here, which means and he's from the 60s.
So he doesn't believe in all this CIA propaganda stuff in The Washington Post.
He's been very good on Ukraine, for example, sees right through all this, agrees with you on all these takes, essentially.
But he's saying to Putin, then you came in and you ended all this privatization.
Right.
But Putin is a right winger, right?
I mean, not far.
I don't know, too far.
Right.
He's essentially a conservative Republican capitalist Christian type, not like too born again, I don't think.
But essentially, that would be his analog in America, maybe more of a Buchananite than a W. Bushite.
And he's saying, well, no, I mean, no.
Of course, we privatize everything.
But what we what we stopped was all this gangsterism where these few people are, you know, running off with all the money.
And I'm sure, you know, he has his own allied gangsters in power as well.
But he was saying, you know, essentially, all they did was guarantee their independence to stop what you were referring to is essentially this plunder under Yeltsin, where they just had this guy.
It's so funny, Ray, you know, honestly, you're a former CIA analyst and they know they're still messing with Russia.
Right.
And here Yeltsin is such a drunken bum that he's so easy to push around.
But that also means that he's easy to push around from the inside, too.
He could be replaced at any time.
It seems like they were acting with such hubris instead of saying, hey, we got to treat these guys, you know, like good sports and give them a reason to be grateful in the future.
As you say, H.W. Bush, we're not going to tap dance on the wall while it falls down and laugh in y'all's face and all of this stuff.
Why would we carry on that kind of policy under Bill Clinton?
I guess, again, they're kind of rationalizing that someday they're going to make Russia partners and all this.
But it seems like they were taking an awful risk in giving a guy like Putin reason to really solidify his power in the name of preserving Russian independence from America.
Well, which came through almost immediately.
Right.
Well, I don't think they were that farsighted.
You know, there was no shame attached to this.
This was an opportunity for people to get really rich really quickly.
And there were, of course, as many Russians involved in this oligarchs as Wall Street's and corporate people.
So they just took advantage of all this because they could.
That's what you expect from this kind of capitalism.
And it left a really sour, sour taste with Putin and the rest of the Russians who really, really suffered under this.
I mean, you know, Russians are no, are no, they suffer a lot for a lot of reasons that this was unnecessary.
This was worse than the Soviet regime.
So Putin, in my view, he's sui generis.
I don't think there's any analog.
I think he reminds me of some of the stronger leaders of Russia, Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible and so forth, who had to exert a lot of power to reunite Russia and protect it from invasions, from example, not only the Mongolians, but the Swedes and the Lithuanians and the Poles and, of course, the French and, of course, the Germans.
So if you're a Russian, you know that history.
If you're an old Russian, like an old American like me, then you know a lot of that history.
You go back to World War Two.
Just another little story, very, very brief.
When I was celebrating the anniversary of the meeting on the Elbe, this would have been the 75th, no, 70th anniversary of the meeting on the Elbe where U.S. forces joined Russian forces in April of 1945, just before the end of the war.
They finally got together on the Elbe River.
OK, now there was a celebration.
I gave a little speech.
Actually, I recited a little poem.
And this general comes up to me.
He's about six foot five.
He looks like he's about 90.
He was 91.
And he looks at me and he says, Studebaker, Studebaker, Studebaker, Studebaker, and he raises his hands and claps.
Wow.
This was a front line infantry general who had Studebakers to carry his troops, who had Studebakers to carry his artillery, who had Studebakers from Lindleis to beat the Germans.
OK.
And what he was looking at me, didn't have any English, of course, we're saying Studebaker, and look on his face was, wow, you guys helped us then.
What's my point?
There's a deep reservoir of memory of how we could help the Russians, how we did help the Russians, how the Russians won World War II, but we helped them, right?
And they couldn't have, well, they couldn't have won it so quickly without our help, without our tanks, without our planes, without so much stuff.
So, you know, it's really a tragedy that this unbridled capitalism spoiled this opportunity that George H.W. Bush defined as a Europe whole and free from Lisbon to Vladivostok.
It was possible at that time when Clinton came in and reversed, you know, Bill Bradley, who was a senator from New Jersey, he knew Clinton in Oxford and they were pretty good friends.
But when NATO enlargement happened, Bradley was, was beside himself and he made a very moving speech and he said, you know, this is a tragedy.
This need not happen.
You're kicking the Russians while they're down.
It's going to come back to bite you.
And of course, George, George Kennan said the same thing about NATO enlargement.
Yeah.
In fact, here, let me go ahead.
I just pull this up real quick.
I want to just go ahead and read a couple of things here, because as long as we're doing this, let's add this to the register here.
George Kennan, of course, was, I believe, ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time when he anonymously wrote on the sources of Soviet conduct for the Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs in 1946, recommending the containment policy in the beginning of it.
And that's at least the dime store cliff notes version of it.
But so he was one of the leading anti-Soviet hawks and the architects of the Cold War policy at its beginning.
Then here he is in 1998 talking to at 94 years old, talking to Thomas Friedman from the New York Times.
And he's absolutely mad as hell.
He says, I think this is the beginning of a new Cold War.
I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely, and it will affect their policies.
I think it is a tragic mistake.
There's no reason for this whatsoever.
No one was threatening anybody else.
This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.
We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.
NATO expansion was simply a lighthearted action by the Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.
What bothers me is how superficial and ill-informed the whole Senate debate was.
I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.
Don't people understand?
Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet communist regime.
Now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.
And then I'm sorry, because I'm looking for the one really great quote in here where he says right here, there.
And Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia.
It shows so little understanding of Soviet history, of Russian history and Soviet history.
Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia.
And then the NATO expanders will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are.
But this is just wrong.
Wow.
That's George Kennan, 1998.
In 1998.
And now a word from X by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times.
Yeah, yeah.
And so he says the two main points there and the point being the two major points.
These are the guys who overthrew the Reds for us.
These aren't the enemies.
These are the friends who defeated the enemies and made it where we didn't even have to, you dummies.
And then secondly, of course, you say it's no problem.
We can do this and we'll get away with it.
But then as soon as they react against it, you'll say that's why we had to do it.
It's because of how aggressive the Russians are when they're the ones reacting.
And that's, you know, come on, that's the history of our last 22 years, 23 years, I think.
Yeah.
Well, Kennan was, of course, right.
You know, Kennan came out of an interesting background.
He was an elitist.
He was a, well, one who at least in the 40s and 50s believed in American indispensability.
Okay.
Now, this is the first thing he wrote for the Policy Planning Council at the Department of State that he headed up as the first person.
He said, you know, although we control 50% of the world's wealth, we only amount to one ninth of the world's population.
And so obviously our policy needs to be devised in such a way as to maintain this, this equilibrium.
We have to do everything we can, including hard power to make sure that we maintain our 50% share.
Wow.
You know, when I read that, until then, Kennan had been my unmitigated hero, but that's, that's the attitude that exists.
Now, how are we going to defend all this?
Well, you know who was responsible for the covert action part of CIA?
George Kennan.
Back in 46, 47, these people came home from the war, from World War II.
People, really good, really smart and enterprising people, courageous people.
They worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.
And they said, now look, you know, thanks for all the applause, but you got workforce here?
I mean, like we're really good about overthrowing governments and we can do all kinds of operational things.
Is there workforce here or should we go back to our law firms or universities or, you know, wherever we used to work, our corporations?
And so Kennan said, whoa, wait a second.
The Russians are overthrowing governments.
We have to have that capability too.
And so the CIA, which Truman had envisaged as an analysis unit, which would report directly to him and tell him things without fear or favor, unlike the Pentagon or the State Department, directly responsive to him.
All of a sudden, this covert action, this group of people who are really good about overthrowing governments was joined to the CIA because George Kennan and the others said we have to have this capability.
Now, out of that, of course, came overthrowing governments in Iran and Guatemala and later Chile and so many others.
So this notion that not only are we indispensable, but that we already have more than our share and we have to make sure that we do everything we can, no matter how underhanded, to protect that share, whether it's equitable or not.
And just another little illustration here.
I was with my five-year-old grandson in his nursery school, and the kids were just wonderful.
They're just really nice to each other.
So I said to the teacher, how do you do this?
There wasn't one fight for those two hours.
She says, Mr. McGovern, come in here.
So I sat down at the table and she says, now, Mr. McGovern, how many shares are on this table?
I said four.
She says, how many toys on the table?
Two.
Well, that's how we do it, Mr. McGovern.
I said, could you explain?
She says, yeah, we teach them they have to share things.
They have to share things.
And once they realize they have to share things, they're nice to each other.
I object.
This world is not big enough for us in Russia.
Somebody's got to go.
Oh, wait, they're like the majority of the earth or something.
All right.
Sorry.
Landmass.
No, I don't mean that.
Don't anyone fact check me.
They're just a very, very large country, even on the accurate map, not the Mercator one.
All right.
So 9-11 happens.
And you might think that Putin thought that, oh, good, now America is going to change sides in the war and finally start dealing with these Al Qaeda guys that Bill Clinton's been supporting the whole time, even while they're attacking us throughout the 1990s.
And so he calls Bush and says, hey, your wish is my command.
You want to borrow some bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan?
I believe it was, you know, roll on in.
In fact, later in 2012, when the Pakistanis closed the route from Karachi to the Khyber Pass, Putin opened back up again the northern route.
And what else are we going to do?
Make friends with Iran and go through there.
So talk about, you know, what Putin was trying to do with W.
Bush in the terror war there.
Well, he was immensely helpful and and it was reciprocated.
There were attacks that we detected that were designed to level cathedrals in Russia that we preempted by telling Russian intelligence those things.
So there was a degree of cooperation.
As a matter of fact, George W.
Bush famously said, you know, the Russians are feeling their way toward wholeness and democracy.
And and China is also trying to build its economy.
We don't have much to fear from them.
That was 2002.
OK, oh, why could they say that?
Well, because there were real enemies in the terrorists.
Right.
So we had terrorism as our primary enemy there.
And when that sort of war thin 10 years later, then they say, well, no, that's the Russians again.
No, it's the Chinese.
Now it's both.
And there's the story, Scott.
Scott, people don't realize that that way back when I started analyzing things in the early 60s, Russia and China were bitter enemies.
I thought and all of my colleagues thought that they would hate each other forever.
Now they're in a virtual love affair.
It's largely because of our own inept diplomacy.
But if we try something in the South China Sea or in the Taiwan Straits or if there's a blow up somewhere in northern Europe, it's not only the Russians that we will be facing.
It's the Chinese as well.
There'll be sable rattling at very least.
And we don't seem to realize that.
Matter of fact, Biden goes to Russia and after his session with with Putin, he says, you know, I told Putin I have to be careful what I say here because this is confidential.
But I said, you know, we know that the Chinese are squeezing you.
We know that you have a thousands of thousands of miles of border with China and China is starting to become maybe very powerful militarily and economically.
We know we know that you have reason to fear China.
And so he says this.
Now, if he said that to Putin, Putin can only conclude that this guy is from he's you know, he's from hunger.
Who's advising him?
Who's telling him that the U.S. can play a kind of the kind of role in dividing China from Russia that they played very adroitly under Nixon and Kissinger?
That time is gone.
That's a long time ago.
Now, China and Russia are pretty much bound together in a virtual military alliance.
And the worst thing is that Biden himself, Joe Biden, doesn't seem to understand this and actually crows to Putin about, oh, you know, you got a real problem there on your border with China.
Yeah, they did.
But that was 60 years ago.
God, it's awful to watch all this.
Yeah.
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All right, now, so W.
Bush withdraws from the ABM treaty and, you know, announces this policy that he's going to put anti-missile missiles in the Czech Republic or in Poland, I guess.
Yeah, in Poland.
And then the radar stations in the Czech Republic and Romanian Poland.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
Romanian.
Well, no, in that the torture bases.
I thought it was pulling the Czech Republic for the missiles.
They're both being fitted for.
Well, OK, yeah.
And then the problem is, too, I forgot the designation of the missile launcher or whatever, but the same missile launcher for the anti-missile missiles is the same one you would use for a Tomahawk cruise missile with a nuclear warhead on it, too.
So that's a big problem.
Now, when W.
Bush announced this publicly for the first time, I think it was already out, but he started talking about it.
It may have been a G8 meeting or something like that in Europe.
And when he said, well, see, this is to protect Poland from Iran and ballistic missile attack from Iran, everybody in the room laughed because he's such a doofus to like the way he says it and everything.
It just comes out all stupid.
And so but then everybody's like, OK, well, that's what the Americans are saying.
So I guess we're just going to not talk about it or where.
But then later on, Obama made the same claim that that's the reason we're doing this is to protect from Iran.
And then, of course, his open mic moment, though, was that he was, I think, climbing down from that.
And I forget where they left that.
I think they I think the Czechs finally said we don't want the radar stations.
Was that where they left it?
But they still did put the missile launchers in Poland.
Is that right?
Yeah, actually, they're more advanced in Romania right now and in Poland.
And Robert Gates, who is the secretary of defense, had a real, real brainstorm and said, you know, we ought to put them on ships and sail those ships into the Black Sea.
OK, and the Baltic.
If there is a political problem such as existed in Czechoslovakia, well, we can put them on ships now.
Gates in his memoir says, you know, I never never did much to make the Russians feel comfortable.
That was not in my job jar.
Now, where do you get that?
He got that from his his protege, his his mentor, Brzezinski.
OK, so their job was not to make the Russians happy.
Conversely, it was to make them really scared, to make them so that, you know, we could intimidate them.
And and of course, Putin has been very, very, very, very strong and very, very specific in saying that when he moved to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO after the coup in Kiev on the 22nd of February 2014, he was as much concerned or even more, as he put it, with the possible emplacement of anti-ballistic missile systems in Ukraine.
In other words, widening NATO to include Ukraine.
Yeah, that was really important, really bad.
But even more important was to prevent these emplacements, because, as Putin has explained, we know, he says, we Russians know exactly the diameter of these holes you're putting in the ground, so to speak.
And we know that, as you already said, Scott, they can be read readily adapted to offensive cruise missiles.
And those cruise missiles have the capability of knocking out the majority of our ICBM sites in Russia.
That is a first strike capability.
We will not tolerate that.
So there you have it.
Are we still doing it?
Yeah, they're in Romania now and they're going to Poland.
What the rationale was Iran?
Well, Iran, we had an agreement that they would stop making nuclear, or would not make nuclear weapons.
How about North Korea?
Oh, North Korea was cited at one point.
We're protecting Europe from North Korea.
And, you know, the Europeans had to suppress their laughs.
Now, is there a change in Europe?
Yes, there is.
And this is really significant.
I've been saying for 75 years now, you West Europeans ought to grow up.
We can understand how you were children right after the war, how you were adolescents, how you had to do what your parent, the United States, said.
You don't have to do that anymore.
Now, it never happened until this year when Angela Merkel stood up to Biden and earlier to Trump and said, no, no, we're going to go ahead with this Nord Stream 2 deal.
It's really, really good for us.
It's good for the rest of Europe.
We're going to accept Russian gas and oil through this second pipeline under the Baltic.
And, yeah, it's too bad about the Ukrainians.
But, yeah, they'll miss about a billion dollars a year in revenue that they now get from our oil and gas shipments through Ukraine.
But, you know, we're going to go ahead with this.
And we're not going to buy liquidified natural gas from the United States at three times the cost.
Now, that's big.
That is really, really big.
That is standing up to U.S. diktat and Biden had to back down.
Now, we'll see more and more of that.
And, you know, if I were a European, I would not only be afraid, I would not only be concerned about Biden.
I would be concerned about the very real prospect, and hold on to this now, that Trump could come back.
OK, yeah, Trump could come back.
My God.
So what, you know, perish the thought, but that's a possibility.
Look what's happening in our country.
So so the West Europeans and the East Europeans, less, but they're starting to think for themselves.
And Germany and France are having their own summit with Putin.
They thumbed their nose at the U.S. to say, no, no, no, no, no, some no individual summits.
So they're going to do it themselves.
So they realize that these sanctions that were put in because of Ukraine, ostensibly because the Russians or pro-Russians shot down MH17, they have not been shown the evidence that there is no evidence that suggests that otherwise they would have been shown this evidence.
And they're beginning to realize that they've been had and their economies have suffered where the U.S. economy is not.
And the Russian economy is becoming more and more autarkic and able to fend for itself.
So things are changing.
And all these things are to the detriment of the image of the United States as the exceptional or the indispensable country in the world, because we ain't that anymore.
And we ought to realize it and behave accordingly.
Now, look, I mean, I voted for Harry Brown.
So this is no Al Gore partisanship here, but you got to admire kind of the ridiculous self-satire of George Bush's dumbest son being the guy put in the chair.
It just happens to be the way the Americans do it.
It turns out he gets inaugurated in January of 2001 to be captain of the world empire, the most powerful one that's ever existed with, you know, at the peak essentially of our bubble.
And then that's who they gave the keys to was this most ridiculous and horrible person who then appointed all of the rest of the most ridiculous and horrible people to decide what to do and down the list like you couldn't have come up with a worse bunch of guys.
In fact, I should say, though, because I like this thesis, because I think it really does sort of show the difference there.
And maybe I'm oversimplifying it, Ray.
I don't know what you think.
But if there had not been Cheney and Rumsfeld, but just random Midwestern senators as vice president and defense secretary, essentially ideological, less just run of the mill Republican politician types in there.
And then Colin Powell, which is who everybody was voting for anyway.
The people that voted for Bush thought, well, at least he's got Colin Powell up there.
And if it had just been Colin Powell, not Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and those guys, but Colin Powell and his guys calling the shots there, that probably none of this would have happened.
The kick in North Korea out of the treaty, breaking the, you know, the agreed framework deal with North Korea, breaking the anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia.
And I think a rock or two, I'm sure they would have carpet bombed a rock or two for eight years straight.
But I don't think they would have marched in there and done a regime change like that.
And to me, that just shows how and look, Colin Powell, of course, lied us into war.
He clicked his heels and did everything they wanted.
But this wasn't his agenda.
It didn't.
It just goes to show it was, you know, as as Thomas Friedman says, it was like nine guys who made this happen.
These guys over from, you know, representing Israel's interests, essentially, and working in the vice president's office and the DOD there to get it done and the State Department.
But anyway, I just think that's that is like the difference.
Never even mind if Al Gore had won.
But just if Colin Powell had won instead of Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, how different everything could have been in this century so far.
And and, you know, I think obviously I'm always on the Middle East, but Russia policy is just another huge example where I can't imagine that Powell and Armitage had anything this stupid in mind.
I mean, I guess they did lead the push, right, to try to get Ukraine into NATO and everything.
It was Powell really a believer in all of that?
Well, he is rambling.
I'm sorry, man.
I don't know.
He had no guts.
You know, if he grew up three blocks from me in the Bronx, I know the mentality.
I, too, was from immigrant stock.
He was from Caribbean stock.
He went to City University of New York.
He went to the ROTC and he became a figure.
He became somebody.
Somebody as long as he saluted, he got ahead.
He was really bright.
OK, so he becomes the head of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And how do you do that?
By saluting.
How do you do that?
By covering up my lie.
How do you do that?
By telling, by doing what Weinberger wanted in terms of selling, selling armaments to Iran.
You know, the guy was corrupted along the way and couldn't really separate out his situation.
So, you know, it's a real tragedy that he didn't, he should have quit when he knew what was going on and he didn't have it in him.
But, you know, these are all contrary to fact conditions here.
And we're left with the reality that Rumsfeld and Cheney and Wolfowitz and Pearl and all these guys did come into into power and that our military were just just meek as a sheep because they were able to do what they wanted to do.
They got more stars and, you know, they should have known better than.
So they just let themselves be rolled over by people like Rumsfeld.
Back in 91, you may recall where we had that wonderful, glorious first attack on Iraq to dislodge them from from Kuwait.
Wesley Clarke, the general who used to head up NATO, went to Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary at the time.
And he said, now, Paul, this says congratulations.
Boy, you did a great job.
Now, what's the main lesson you learned from this very big victory in early 1991?
And Wolfowitz said without hesitation, we learned that we can do these things and Russia can't stop us.
Well, how about attacking Iraq in a war of aggression?
Well, we could do those things and Russia couldn't stop us.
What about Syria?
Russia stopped us.
What about Ukraine?
Russia stopped us.
So people have to come to the realization that Russia can, will and has stopped us.
And there's no reason in God's creation where we can't get along with Russia unless we believe Russia is going to attack us or that Russia is going to land on the Atlantic beaches or that Russia is going to take over Europe.
Those are all myths that are hard to dispel, but they have been fostered by our media to such degree that most people, even some sophisticated people, believe it to be reality.
Yeah.
You know, I'm almost certain it's Jamie Rubin, who used to work for the State Department, but who's just an unofficial advisor to Hillary Clinton now, Christiane Amanpour's husband.
And he wrote why to, the real reason to, I'm sorry, get rid of Assad or whatever it is, in foreign policy, that he also sent her as a private memo as revealed by Julian Assange WikiLeaks, but where he says in there, don't worry, Russia won't do anything.
That's like one of the things that he can guarantee is we can do this and they definitely won't intervene.
And then, of course, as you say, that didn't quite turn out like that.
Very bad bet by these, you know, they're way too sure of themselves, these guys.
But all right, so now back to W. Bush here and what did happen.
And I'm sorry about that whole rant about what could have been.
But just it's so funny and ironic that idiot Governor Bush was the guy in the chair right at the dawn, not just of the new century, but of the new millennium.
And then what's his idea is to ruin everything.
It's not like Bill Clinton was a good president or anything, as we covered.
He was back in Al-Qaeda in some of these wars.
But George W. Bush kicked the whole pile over, not just in the Middle East, but with Russia too.
And as soon as he got out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, it's clear that Putin ordered his military to develop an entire new generation of nuclear weapons.
That's right.
That's a big deal.
And I'm pretty sure that he says, and this is a clip that I saw you give a speech to a peace group where you explain all this, and then you played a clip or had them play a clip from the Oliver Stone interview.
And I'm pretty sure it's the same clip.
I remember I just watched all four episodes of it the other day, and I'm pretty sure I found the same thing where essentially he's saying that, look, I kind of don't think that you really mean us harm, right?
You're our American partners.
We like you and stuff.
He's always talking like that.
He's like, but then again, you know, you ring my country with anti-missile missiles, then I got to make bigger, better missiles, don't I?
You know, something like that.
Look, this is the position that you're putting me in, Oliver Stone, my good friend, American partner of mine.
I don't want to do it, but you're making me.
And the thing is, I mean, really, it just sounds credible.
It doesn't sound like that's just a great line of BS.
It sounds like, yeah, well, that's what you would do if you were the president of Russia and George W. Bush was the president of America at the time and had a John Bolton policy on this.
And so then he claims that he's got heavy new multiple reentry vehicle missiles that could take out that fly around the South Pole where we have no defense whatsoever and new.
I think I forget if it's the same missile or a different missile that has so many different MERVs on, they could take out every major city in Texas with one missile.
And then there's the nuclear powered cruise missile that has essentially an unlimited range that can evade all defenses and go around them simply and just hit their targets from the rear side or whatever it is.
And then a new nuclear torpedo for taking out, you know, New York Harbor, San Francisco Bay in one shot with an H-bomb.
And then, of course, the hypersonic missiles.
And they have, man, I just read this thing the other day.
I'm trying to get the guy on the show.
Where was it that I read this?
I'm so sorry, man.
I got what Biden's got nowadays about all the new hypersonic missiles that the Russians have.
And it's four or five different kinds of these things with different ranges and capabilities and maneuver abilities that reduce warning time to essentially five minutes or 10 or whatever it is.
And so then this is, again, everything in the world that's not Woodrow Wilson's fault is George W. Bush's fault, it seems like.
Everything in the world is George W.
Bush's fault, isn't it?
He really screwed us on this deal.
Well, Clinton screwed up before him.
Yeah.
You know, we were on a pretty good path.
There was no reason why we couldn't revert to the relationship we had with Russia during World War II.
There was a huge opportunity in Europe for the falling of these walls and the developing of a free and whole situation, as George H.W. Bush termed it.
And greed took over.
People said, no, no, look, we have these immense resources in Russia.
It was a throwback to George Kennan.
We want to keep control over at least 50 percent of the world's resources.
And what better way to do that than milk what used to be the Soviet Union?
And it all fell apart.
And then we needed an enemy after the terrorists were pretty much subdued, or Al-Qaeda was removed, and ISIS was also sort of stemmed.
So we needed an enemy.
Russia was always good.
And people think of Russia still as the Soviet Union.
So we did that.
And now we're pivoting to Asia.
It's all really good.
And I hate to say this again, but it's all really good for what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex.
You know, what people need to remember is that Eisenhower said, now this could be a power that is intended or even not intended.
Well, we know now that that power is fully intended.
The other thing he said, which bears mention, is that the only break on this, the only way to stem this tide is a fully informed electorate, a well-informed populace.
And that's what we don't have.
We don't have a populace that is informed well enough to realize that we don't have to spend billions and trillions on projects like the F-35.
I mean, you don't have to be an economist and talk about opportunity costs that are left there.
Just realize how many billions are being spent.
It's beyond our ken.
We just can't really figure out what a trillion dollars is.
But that's what's going, my tax money, to build these weapons that don't really work, that only stuff the pockets of the people that make the weapons.
And here's Putin, who has a whole different system of making weapons.
And what little is said about his claims for these hypersonic and other weapons is very, very odd, because normally you would have a military saying, you know, we've got to do that, too, or we've got to steal more money.
But I don't see much of that.
And I don't see much in the press about whether this is real or not.
So I assume it's real.
I assume there's a lot of embarrassment that in building armaments like the F-35, we've lost, we've let the Russians steal a march on us.
ABMs never work.
This was a pipe dream of Ronald Reagan, sold to him by people who wanted to make a lot of money.
They said that we could prevent any Soviet missiles from coming.
And that was, that was stupid.
That was weird.
We told Reagan, you can't build that kind of system.
And he went ahead anyway, because Star Wars was his, was his, his bag, so to speak.
Yeah.
All right.
So it's, I forget if this is right.
Is it right that W. Bush and his government didn't outright propose to start bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO until 2008?
Because that doesn't seem right.
But then I think that's how I remember it.
And then it was shortly after that, that Georgia attacked South Ossetia.
So I was wondering if you could give us kind of a briefing on that war real quick before we skip to Ukraine.
Yeah.
In early, well, in late 2007, early 2008, discussions began about bringing Ukraine and Georgia, the country of Georgia, into NATO.
And this is when Bill Bradley spoke out eloquently saying, this is really crazy.
He said that publicly.
And what happened was Sergei Lavrov, the newly, he was new at the time, Russian foreign minister, called Bill Burns.
William Burns was our ambassador in Moscow.
Now he's head of the CIA.
He called, his secretary said, Mr. Burns, you're needed in the foreign ministry.
He goes in there and Lavrov says to him, Mr. Burns, do you know what nyat means?
And Burns says, well, yeah, I think so.
Well, nyat means nyat.
OK.
And nyat is a red line.
And the red line is no Ukraine or Georgia in NATO.
Do you understand that?
Yes, I do.
Because if that happens, if Ukraine happens, we will have to decide whether we have to invade Ukraine.
At very least, there's going to be a civil war.
It's right on our doorstep.
Don't do it.
Tell your superiors.
Now, to his credit, Bill Burns sends a cable back to Washington.
And we have the cable, thanks to Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who have the cable.
And in it, Burns says, you know, Russia has its own strategic interests to protect here.
Oh, Russia is entitled to have its own strategic interests?
So there's a little gutsy on the side of, you know, reporting back to Condoleezza Rice, I guess, was at the time.
So anyhow, that's the 1st of February 2008.
Three months later, April 3rd, 2008, at the NATO summit in Bucharest, the final declaration says Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO.
Whoa.
So what happens?
Well, the right wingers, the real crazies in Washington say to Shakespeare, the head of Georgia, hey, this is your chance.
Knock those Russians out of South Ossetia, the little province just north of Georgia.
And so he tries to do that.
And he gets a really, really bad bloody nose from the Russians who come through those tunnels under the mountains and come up to the gates of Tbilisi just to show what they can do.
No, Georgia is not going to go into NATO and NATO is not going to do a damn thing to protect Georgia if it flails out against Russia.
Now, that was what happened in August of 2008.
And then, you know, there was a quiescent period until there was a blooming of detente that is U.S. with Russia.
And when I say blooming, I'm saying a real deal here.
And what I mean is that Syria, there was a false flag attack outside of Damascus at a place called Douma in Syria.
Sarin gas was used and immediately John Kerry got up and accused Bashar al-Assad of using sarin gas against dissidents in Syria.
It was a false flag.
He couldn't even get the intelligence community to do an assessment because he wouldn't buy what the conclusion was.
So what am I saying here?
That was the idea that this was the cause célèbre.
This was the reason that we would go to war and overtly in Syria using U.S. forces.
And everyone, Obama finally later recognized, everybody advising him was really pressing for overt war on Syria.
So what happens?
He goes up to St. Petersburg for one of these wider summits and Putin takes him by the shoulders and says, Mr. Obama, you remember when we were in Ireland in June and we set up that little working group to see how we could get rid of Syrian chemical weapons?
Yeah, well, we've won.
We've done it.
Syria is willing to announce that it's getting rid of all its chemical weapons, the ones left over from before, and they'll do it under U.N. supervision on a U.S. ship because you're the only ones that have specially outfitted ships to destroy chemical weapons.
What do you think?
Obama says, really?
Wow.
That would get me off the horns of this dilemma because everybody's telling me I have to strike Syria.
OK, let's see what happens.
Well, next day, the Syrian foreign minister announces the deal.
John Kerry, three days later, is in London.
He's asked, is there nothing that Syria can do to prevent being attacked?
And he says, and I quote, well, they could give up their chemical weapons, but that's not going to happen.
That's not in the cards.
It gets on the plane and Obama calls him and says, now, John, I should have told you this, but I worked out this deal with with Putin.
They're going to destroy, the Syrians are giving up all their nuclear weapons, all their chemical weapons, and we're going to destroy them on U.S. ships.
And so I want to see you when you arrive.
You will say hello, but then I want you to go right back to Geneva and conclude this agreement.
And Kerry said, wow, really?
Oh, OK.
So what am I saying?
I'm saying that you get Kerry and you get these people out of the way and you deal directly with a Soviet leader and he offers you something, a deal that you can't really say no to that gets you off the horns of a dilemma.
It works.
Now, that was the high point.
That was the high point of Russian-U.S. relations.
And indeed, on the 11th of September, date is just a coincidence, Vladimir Putin has an op-ed in The New York Times.
And what does it say?
It says, I, Vladimir Putin, are really, I am really appreciative of the growing trust between not only our countries, but between myself and President Obama.
Now, there's a curious last, he talks about Syria and the deal that's worked out.
The last paragraph is really, really strange.
I have it pretty much in memory here.
He says, you know, there's only one thing that I disagree with the president on.
Just last week, he again said that the U.S. is the sole exceptional country in the world.
I think that's wrong.
I think there are various countries, various stages of development, some closer to democracy, some not so close.
But when God looks at all these people, he considers all these countries equal, period, end of op-ed.
I was told at the time by pretty good sources that Putin handwrote that last paragraph in all by himself.
And that was confirmed later when he said precisely the same thing in precisely the same words at another interview just two years ago.
So what am I saying here?
Well, that's September 2013.
So the neocons say, OK, we didn't get our war.
We didn't get our war on Syria.
Let's see if we can get this Putin really a bloody nose.
And the preparations for the coup in Ukraine got on in motion really seriously.
And we know that we count the months, September, what that five, six months later in Kyiv was the most blatant coup in history, advertised two and a half weeks before in a telephone conversation intercepted between Victoria Nuland and our ambassador in Kyiv.
I mean, it was not only the most blatant, it was the most predicted coup because the people who took over in Ukraine were precisely the people mentioned by Victoria Nuland and the ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt.
So they got back.
OK, they got back at Putin.
Putin was in Sochi at the Olympics.
OK, he comes back and he said, oh, my God, look what they've done.
Do they really want to take Ukraine into NATO?
Do they really think they can get away with this?
Well, one thing for sure, they can't have Crimea because that's got Sevastopol.
It's got our only only all year round ice free naval base.
And so let's do a let's do a plebiscite in Crimea.
We know how that will come out because most of those people down there are Russian stock.
And we'll if they ask to be annexed, we'll annex them.
We'll take them back into Russia.
And that's that's the way that thing went down.
So what happened?
Well, the relationship between Russia and the United States went down to its nadir at that point.
And of course, the U.S. insisted by claiming that the Russians were responsible for MH17 in July of 2014, insisted that the Europeans and others imposed sanctions, economic sanctions, which, as I said before, hurt the Europeans much more than the Russians and hurt the United States not at all.
That's the history.
And it's really a sad one.
And things don't seem to be getting any better.
Yeah, well, you know, it's important to that and we get back to the war in eastern Ukraine and all that in a second.
But it's worth pointing out that the coup of 2014, this is twice in 10 years.
In fact, it's the same guy that they overthrew the last time to Yanukovych, the Russian leading guy who had been legitimately elected, according to the EU, in 2010.
But they had done the Orange Revolution to overthrow him back in the Bush years.
And, you know, the color coded revolutions really started in the Clinton years.
I'm not sure exactly who was first.
I think Milosevic was first in Serbia, but then they had color coded revolutions or attempted ones, at least in Belarus and Tajikistan.
And in again, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, they did the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon.
And I'm probably leaving out four or five of them starting in the Clinton years and then through the Bush years.
And I forget, can you remind me if they continued into Obama years other than 2014?
And that wasn't really a color coded one unless the color is the Wolf's Angle of the Galatian SS there.
Well, you had other wars going on in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, places.
Well, the color coded revolutions were they're kind of a separate thing.
We had Optor and the NED, and it was always the denim revolution of the yellow revolution.
And it was what in the pink or the yellow in Tajikistan and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.
And I know I'm leaving out a couple.
Sorry, everybody whose government we overthrew.
I didn't mean to neglect you.
Yeah, so that's a big deal.
So then they do it again in 2010.
And then so this is something that I learned from, I think, James Carden.
He's very good.
Yeah, I'd like to give credit in the right place.
I know that he mentioned this in a recent piece.
I think he's the same guy I learned it from the first time that and it was the I think the British Parliament pointed it out.
But in his recent piece, he linked to a thing in the Kiev Post about it, about how after the well, obviously, the first thing they did was outlaw Russian as a second language.
And then there was this incident with some people in a bus, something like that.
But then Yushchenko, the guy that they overthrew Yanukovych for back in 04 and two other presidents and I forget which other two, if it was Timoshenko or exactly who, but Yushchenko was one of them.
They all wrote this letter essentially demanding that the new government kick the Russians out of Sevastopol.
And that was really according to the British Parliament, I believe, as well.
That was really the final straw that made Putin call out the little green men, as they called them, to just essentially leave their base and leave and and just walk over and take the the peninsula, as you said before, without a shot being fired or a couple of warning shots over the head of a couple of guys.
But nobody killed in that thing.
So that's a hell of a provocation.
And I remember you quoting before, too, were Putin.
I forgot the source where he had said, you know, because he's a humorous guy that Putin he says, you know, we would love to visit our American friends for the holidays down at the Sevastopol Naval Base.
But then I was thinking about it further and I thought, nah, you know what?
It'd be better if we stay there and you guys come and visit us for the holidays instead.
Wouldn't that be nice or something?
You know, in other words, yeah, I'm keeping my naval base, guys.
You're not taking it from me.
Come on.
Which, again, you know, it goes to show the hubris and the ignorance and the ridiculousness of I mean, we're talking about Robert Kagan's wife arranging all of this stuff.
I forgot.
I don't I don't know if you ever mentioned this part of it to me.
But Eric Margulies says to me, he says, you know, that the Russians or, you know, the Soviets at least lost something like three or four hundred thousand men fighting to protect the Crimean Peninsula from the Nazis from the Germans in World War Two.
So let's see how many guys died at the Alamo again, like 75 or something like that.
They lost how many?
Somewhere between three and four hundred thousand people protecting that base one time.
Oh, yeah.
No, I'm sure they're just going to give it up to Robert Kagan's wife if she asked.
Nice.
Yeah.
Well, that's, you know, people need a sense of history.
I've been there.
I've been in Sevastopol and I've been in the citadels and the fortresses that the Russians fought the Nazi hordes off from.
They didn't win many of those battles, but they they fought to the end.
That's why they lost so many people.
People don't realize that Russian history is very different from ours and that this is a part of the Russian character.
They've suffered a lot and they realize that we haven't.
They realize that our presidents and that are even our policymakers have not even donned the uniform, except for the odd person who may be a marine or maybe a secretary of defense now.
So this makes a big difference, because if you don't know what war is like, well, you don't know what war is like.
And that makes you very, very dangerous.
Yeah.
Well, now, part of this, too, is there's the legacy of the Soviet Union here where the Russians moved a bunch of Russians into Ukraine.
And so it's you know, I don't know exactly what the proportions are, but there's an ethnic and obviously a major linguistic split there.
And so if people just want to be reactionary and fight as factions about it, there's plenty to fight about if they're not determined to get along here.
And so then, you know, as Putin complains in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, you have a bunch of ethnic Russians left behind, not enemy lines, but at least foreign state lines.
And so that can be a problem, especially in the old world where the lines are all drawn in, quote, unquote, the wrong places, which I don't know how anyone could ever reconcile that with all the magic wishes in the world.
But anyway, so then once this coup happens, you have not just the secession and the coup de main in Crimea, but you also have these separatist pro-Russian factions in the east of Ukraine.
I think the American hawks would say this is, you know, the Russians are behind this all along.
I'm not so sure about that.
But, you know, these activists essentially said, well, we can seize buildings and refuse to recognize the new coup junta that's overthrown the guy that we elected fair and square.
And so then, you know, you might help me out and refine my timeline here a little bit, but the way I remember it then was Kiev declared a war on terrorism and started killing them.
And and then that led to this horrible war that through 2014 and 15.
And I don't know when I mean, I guess there's still low level fighting going on, but a pretty brutal war where something over 10,000 people were killed, I believe.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, it was a real tragedy.
How do I say this?
You know, Putin feels really, really strongly about this.
And he's often misquoted.
He said that the fall falling apart of the Soviet Union was a tragedy.
Now, everybody says, ah, so he's a real Russian communist.
Well, that's not what he meant.
What he meant very explicitly was that when the Soviet Union fell apart, as you just indicated, there were millions, millions of Russian citizens who were left on the other side of the Russian border.
Now, Ukraine, of course, is one of those those places.
So are the Baltics.
So Putin feels a sense of responsibility for what happened to those folks.
Now, when Luhansk and Donetsk, the two Donbass provinces there right on the Russian border, when they refused to submit to the pro-fascist, the pro-Nazi kind of factions that took over after the revolution, after the coup in February 2014, they said, no, no, we don't want to take diktat from you guys.
We're going to have our own little separate autonomy.
And they fought for that.
Now, what was Putin to do?
Did he invade those places?
No.
But he gave military and I think professional soldiers support for these people.
And what happened was Robert Gates went to, not Robert Gates, but John Brennan went to Kiev and said, all right, you start this war.
We're behind you.
Clean those guys out.
And that's what started this really brutal internecine war where the Ukrainian troops, such as they were, tried to take these provinces and failed.
Now, this is still a sore, but there was an international agreement called the Minsk agreements, which would guarantee these provinces a degree of autonomy.
And the Ukrainians were part and parcel of the agreement and they have failed to honor it.
And so the thing goes on and people do still get killed with the artillery fire and everything else.
So it's really, really sad.
But, you know, this business about the Russians who are left on the other side of the Russian border, that's a big deal.
That's a big deal for Putin.
He said so 10 years ago in a very declarative way.
And he said so since then.
And most people misinterpret what he said, because that is what he meant when he said it was a tragedy.
I mean, is it a misinterpretation to say that he's implying that, you know, if it comes down to it, he might just expand Russia's borders to include them again?
Well, that would be an over-interpretation.
I think what he's simply saying is, please understand that we have a certain obligation to defend our countrymen and that we're not going to let Kiev come in with its armed forces, whether it's armed by the U.S. or anybody else, and obliterate these Russian citizens.
And I should have pointed that out.
Putin made it very easy for Ukrainians living in those provinces to become Russian citizens, and millions of them have become Russian citizens.
Some already were.
And so you do have a real cause celebre here were the Ukrainians to use these fancy weapons that we are providing them to obliterate Donetsk and Lugansk.
You know, they better not try to do that.
And I think that what good came out of April and May and June of this year that's just passed, this past June and this spring, is that when the head of Ukraine, Zelensky, threatened to take Crimea back and threatened to take back the occupied territories, as he called them, well, the Russians sent two full armies and three airborne formations to the border and scared the daylights out of NATO and Washington.
And that's what Putin meant when he said, do you know what asymmetrical means, Washington?
You know what asymmetrical means?
That means two full armies and three airborne formations.
And that's what we're going to put on the border if you decide to obliterate our countrymen who are in these provinces.
So it's a big deal.
And I think that, well, I don't think, you know, when you're an analyst, you put chronologies together.
And what happened was on one day in April, I think was the 11th of April, what happened was NATO said, oh, my God, the Russians are amassing troops on Ukrainian border.
And the head of the Russian army, Shoigu, the minister of defense, actually said, yeah, that's right.
Two armies, three airborne.
You got that right.
Asymmetrical.
You know what asymmetrical means?
Now, two guided missile destroyers were on their way into the Black Sea.
And Ryabkov, the deputy foreign minister said, you really ought to not do that, U.S., because we can't guarantee their safety.
Biden finally got some good advice and said, you know, turn those guided missile destroyers back, let them visit Greece instead of the Black Sea.
And in some some panic said, oh, let's have a summit all on the same day, all on the same day.
And that's when the summit started.
So the reason for the summit was to kind of get to Moscow and sort of get a face to face thing where Biden could say, well, you know, where are your red lines?
Here are red lines.
And besides, how about these hypersonic weapons?
What about it?
What about that?
And of course, we've sort of started negotiations on that, although they don't seem to be going anywhere.
But the reason for the summit was this really, really strong reaction to these crazy guys in Kiev who threatened to take Crimea and the Donbass back.
And the reaction by Russia was totally predictable, but very asymmetrical.
And it did scare the daylights out of the U.S.
And it was then, precisely then, that Biden was encouraged to ask for a summit, which he did.
Now, we could talk more about the summit if you like, but that's how it that's how it was initiated.
Yeah, well, so, yeah, go ahead and and wrap up there with Minsk, too, and all that.
I mean, it was it's important the way the Germans and the French took the lead there.
And then I want to talk to you about the Trump years for a while.
You still got a while to sit here with me or what?
Yeah, I do.
Yeah, great.
OK, so so, yeah, wrap up about the conflict in Ukraine, even though it's not all the way over yet.
And then we'll talk about some.
Well, Trump years gets back in Ukraine again.
But anyway.
Yeah, OK, just to finish up things we haven't quite covered the day before the coup.
The foreign ministers of Germany and Poland and the head of the Department for Continental Europe at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of French in France, they witnessed the signing of an agreement under which Yanukovych agreed to have early presidential elections.
And everything, everyone would stop all this agitation on the Maidan in Kiev.
Now, that was the deal.
And the Germans were part of that.
So were the French and so were the Poles.
The next day, of course, there was a putsch, there was a blatant coup, and it overturned that whole agreement.
When I talk to an assistant, the Russian specialist at the German foreign ministry about this, he was there with Steinmeier, the foreign minister.
I said, well, you know, let's talk about the coup in Kiev.
And he said, what coup?
And I said, you were there, you know, about the agreement, you know, that the next day there was a coup.
He said, what coup?
And it was then and there that I realized that in an intelligence exchange, you can be pretty candid, you can share views that aren't quite official.
With a high level foreign ministry official in Berlin, that was not possible.
But, you know, this what coup business still pervades.
So that was that was February 2014.
The next big thing was the knockdown of MH17, the Malaysian airliner, killing 298 people.
Why do I mention that?
I mention that because John Kerry immediately blamed the Russians or pro-separatists.
And this is what he said, two sentences.
He told NBC, we picked up the imagery of this launch.
We know the trajectory.
We know where it came from.
We know the timing.
And it was exactly at that time that the aircraft disappeared from the radar, end quote.
Oh, OK.
That's really interesting.
Then how come you won't share that information with the Dutch court system, which is trying some Russians and Ukrainians for having knocked down that plane?
How come the Dutch intelligence service is up in arms because you refuse to share that information?
Well, I think I know because that information doesn't say what you say it says.
Do we do we know what happened with MH17?
Of course we do.
I know enough about our intelligence collection capabilities to be assured to assure you of that.
And, you know, during that time, they were they were focused laser like on that particular part of Ukraine.
So do we know what happened?
Ninety five percent, I would swear that we know.
Is it what John Kerry said?
Well, I ask you, if it's what John Kerry said and there's no there's no possibility of danger to sources and methods, which is the case, why don't we give that to the Dutch now or even the Germans?
I spoke in the German Bundestag at the Linke, the link is the left faction party, and I raised all these things.
So why don't you Germans, why don't you Germans ask for this information?
Kerry says he hasn't.
They never did.
So we have a ways to go on that.
So that's that's to wrap up the Ukraine thing.
And of course, that was after the high point of negotiating the destruction of Syrian chemical weapons in September of 2013.
This is the very low point where because of MH17, the reluctant Europeans were forced, in their view, in 13 days forced to put on very heavy economic sanctions, which, as I said, hurt them more than hurt the Russians.
So that's that left us there.
Where do you want to go from here, Scott?
Yeah, well, so Donald Trump comes in and is framed for treason.
And it's important to note here, and it's only in parentheses because I don't want to go down this whole thing, but the audience should know that our friend Ray here was second to none in debunking Russiagate from the beginning.
And even though he's also on the record as thinking Trump was absolutely horrible, the worst president ever, he said that still doesn't make him guilty of this whole hoax.
Of Russiagate and fixing the election with the Russians and all of that.
But, you know, despite the narrative there about him being Putin's puppet and all of that, in fact, he was more of a Russia hawk on paper than Barack Obama ever was.
Well, depends on how you slice it.
But so Barack Obama hired a bunch of Hitler loving Nazis to overthrow the government in Kiev, as you say, there in the coup of February 2014.
But then Obama also was too chicken to give him any weapons because they had enough already and he gave him some training and stuff like that.
But he he was afraid to give him these javelin, you know, anti-tank missiles and this kind of thing where Trump comes in.
And in fact, there was at least one direct quote.
In fact, you probably were the one who found the quote.
And I'm quoting you secondhand thing of Trump Jr.saying, see, you can't call us soft on Russia now.
This proves what hawks we are, that we do this, which, you know, I think probably was a reflection of the thinking inside the White House that like, man, we have to do something to prove what, you know, tools of the Russians we ain't.
And so they did give him those javelins and an increased training for them there.
And they brought in Montenegro and Macedonia and North Macedonia.
Don't anybody at me into NATO expanding by two and Trump.
Tucker Carlson's like, man, we shouldn't be doing stuff like that.
And Trump says, yeah, I know we definitely shouldn't.
But meanwhile, he's sitting there while it's happening on his watch.
Anyway, he doesn't know anything.
And then also they sent troops to Poland and to the Baltics.
And then most.
Well, I don't think you can overstate that they're parading within 100 yards or a couple hundred yards of the Russian border there in the Baltics.
And then I think the most important thing of all is something you alluded to earlier, which is a massively increased naval and air presence in the Black and the Baltic seas.
And in fact, I always get it wrong.
I have my map here.
The Sea of Oxtock.
How do you say that in the east?
Yeah, well, you say it.
And they're flying bombers, nuclear bombers, they're testing well and or be ones which I gather are not currently configured to carry nukes.
But anyway, they're they're testing long range bombers and essentially testing Russian air defenses and testing their patients in the Black Sea constantly with their naval presence.
And then, as we've seen recently into the Biden years here with sending the Brits to be provocative there.
So I just wanted to let you talk a little bit about that, because, you know, I don't want to leave it out.
It's a whole kind of mini presidential era there, the four years of Trump.
And as you said so far, I think there's at least a reasonable outside chance that he could be reelected.
I don't know how likely it is, but you know what?
I could see a couple of paths to that at the point at the rate we're going in a lot of different ways.
So I don't know.
But so what's your assessment overall of Trump's Russia policy?
And I should say Trump and Pompeo's since he had a hell of a lot to do with how it was crafted for sure.
Well, you know, let's take it from the Russian standpoint here or perspective.
Putin has long since concluded that American presidents are not in charge.
Certainly they're not fully in charge.
Obama had several mutual promises with Putin about Syria, for example, ceasefires and so forth, which were violated by our military.
The military has a mind of its own and often goes off on its own.
You can imagine how dangerous that appears to a Russian.
Trump was not in control.
He was not in control of the national security setup.
The intelligence community ran circles around him and he couldn't even force the publication of some some sensitive documents that not only showed what happened to JFK, but also showed what happened to Donald Trump before the election, before he was elected and after he was elected.
You know, when he talks about the FBI and the CIA and NSA sort of militating against his election, he's absolutely true.
And he had documents to prove that, which he tried to get published on the last day of his tenure, and the CIA failed to refuse to publish it.
So Putin pretty much knows all that.
And he knows how the Russiagate thing was constructed, mostly by Hillary Clinton, because when she gave that order, there was a Russian intelligence report went back to Moscow saying, yep, here it is, the 26th of July 2016.
Hillary is going to blame Russia for hacking, Russia for interfering in our body politic.
And of course, she lost.
And then the blame for Russia went on steroids.
So Joe Biden, well, Putin is convinced that Biden is a creature of politics and that just as he's a knee jerk person saying what the military industrial complex wants him to say, he couldn't do other, he wouldn't even know how to do other.
And so as Putin has explicitly stated, U.S. policy toward Russia is prevented, is informed by domestic politics.
And he doesn't expect that to change anytime soon.
And so that's why he treasures his growing rapprochement with Beijing and why he turns to China and the kinds of things that China can do together with Russia.
It's really a sea change.
And I'm not sure that people like Blinken and people like that young fellow Jake Sullivan are smart enough, even though they're Ivy Leaguers, to realize that the U.S. is really on the short end of this triangular relationship now.
It may still be an equilateral triangle, but, you know, it's two against one now.
And we're in the on the short end if there's a short end to a equilateral triangle.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I brought up Russiagate only to dismiss it there because, boy, that could be another two and a half hour interview, too.
And we did plenty of it in real time all throughout the whole stupid thing.
But it's, I guess, worth going back over the fact that, wow, what a gigantic, quite official, mainstream governmental conspiracy theory about the evil foreign enemy here.
And one that is has been even to this day very hard for the Democratic Party left, especially to climb down from where, you know, they sort of kind of shut up about it a little bit.
But in terms of the damage done, the demonization of Putin and of Russia to certain sectors, I mean, you and I are almost like oblivious to this part of it just because the whole thing is so idiotic to us all along.
But you put yourself in the average NPR listener lady's shoes.
You know, Russia is absolutely as terrifying as the Soviet Union was at the height of the Red Scare of the 50s or whatever it is.
Right.
I mean, they were out of their gourds with this stuff.
And so now for I mean, imagine the political pressure on Biden and Blinken now if, you know, say Blinken got struck by lightning and thought, boy, I better do the right thing now.
Enough of this.
What would happen?
Like he wouldn't get very far.
They wouldn't let him.
You know, the whole the whole system, especially, you know, politically on in the Democratic Party, but obviously the entire military Mickey Matt machine and all of that, all of the incentives are in Cold War, new nuclear weapons.
There's just a great new study about the nuclear weapons.
And there's a few new of these.
I try to cover these whenever people write them up about how much effort the nuclear weapons industry spends on lobbying to make sure Congress keeps them in business, just like any other interest group.
They're just trying to get rid of some H-bombs, Ray, and they'll do anything to make sure that that program stays on track.
What a huge machine and still what a great enemy.
And Vladimir Putin, he seems like kind of a cold blooded dude.
So good enough for TV.
You know, he makes the perfect character.
I can't remember who it was I was talking to.
Oh, I know it was my friend John I was talking to earlier referred to Al Qaeda like it was Cobra from G.I. Joe, this massively well-equipped, evil, determined enemy out there.
You can picture Vladimir Putin playing the bad guy in a movie or something like that.
You know, the bad dictator in a movie or strongman, whatever it is.
So it's just too perfect for them to let go, really, is all I'm trying to say, isn't it?
It's not like we have the lost continent of Atlantis to have a Cold War against.
There's Russia, China, Iran.
Start running out of people to demonize.
Everybody else in the world is either our friend or at least too cowed by us to try to do anything about it, you know.
Well, the media is key.
That's why when I spell out the Mickey Matt, the military, industrial, congressional, intelligence, media, academia, think tank complex, I always say media like all caps, OK, because it's the linchpin.
It's the thing without which the Mickey Matt can't function.
So as long as, you know, the six corporations that control our major media see as much merit in demonizing people like Putin and Xi in China so that they can build jet aircraft or they can waste money on F-35 projects, that's all to the good.
They don't give a rat's patootie about where that that money could otherwise be invested.
I'm talking about opportunity costs.
I'm talking about bridges, highways, infrastructure that could be built.
Now, I guess you can't expect folks to focus on that.
But, you know, we've been talking about what what in the grand scheme of things got is minutiae.
And the reason I say that is this.
With the perfect storm of COVID, climate change and what's about to happen in Afghanistan, there's a perfect storm there.
And let me just focus on one of those things, and that is climate change.
I have 10 grandchildren.
And what is it going to be like for them if we don't attenuate the known effects?
We can't stop it now, but at least we can attenuate the known effects like 10 years, 15 years out.
You know, I'm old enough.
I could say, oh, am I lucky?
I could have clean air.
I could have clean water for the rest of my life.
But my God, how irresponsible that is.
So what I'm saying here is that if we don't get together with places like China, places like Russia and meet this existential problem, OK, existential like the existence of the planet, that, you know, it's all for naught.
And, you know, to her credit, this Averill Haynes, who is now the National Intelligence Director, you know, it was quite bizarre in beginning her annual threat briefing.
She said, and I don't have the direct quote, but she said, you know, the overweening problem here is climate change.
Nothing else really matters as much as climate change.
And so we really, before we get into the nitty gritty here, realize that not only is climate change the main problem, but we can't do it alone, even if we resolve to do so.
So we need we need allies.
We need other great countries to cooperate with us here.
So, you know, this is the grand scheme of things.
And the most recent UN report, of course, makes this very, very clear.
So if we can't sort of get along with countries like China and Russia and we can't even cooperate with them on COVID, much less Afghanistan, there's going to be a big tumult in this country.
People are going to say, who lost Afghanistan?
And the people who really lost Afghanistan, I'm talking about our generals that got many more stars in Afghanistan and lied to us tooth and nail.
And we have the documents in that wonderful wrap up that The Washington Post has put out.
Are we going to hold those generals accountable?
Are we going to hold the fellow who ran the study, ostensibly at least, Bruce Rydell accountable?
He's an old CIA analyst, works for Brookings now.
You know, he directed this study way back in 2009, which said, oh, yeah, we need to surge in Afghanistan.
Oh, yeah, yeah, we need to put 30,000 more in Afghanistan.
Well, what a lot of bull, you know?
I mean, Alexander the Great was smart enough to turn around and go back to Asia Minor, where he knew what he's doing when he saw those mountains.
And when the equivalent of today's Taliban was chipping away at his flanks, and then after him, the Mongolians, the Indians, the Persians, the British, the Russians.
And now we, we thought we could conquer Afghanistan.
Give me a, give me a break.
So this is more than just a rant.
It's an attempt to sort of put a perspective on things that, that is existential.
It's very, very rarely can you use that word accurately.
But our planet is at risk.
We know how to attenuate some of the risk now, and we can't do it alone.
And if we keep up this mad military rivalry, the military wastes more in the way of fossil fuels than anybody else in our country.
If we keep doing that, instead of reaching the kind of agreements that John Kennedy would have been able to do because he was not only well-intentioned, but a smart politician, then, you know, my, my grandchildren are not going to have much of a life.
Look here, you and I both know that what you need is some Libertarian Institute things, like shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and stickers to put on the back of your truck, and to give to your friends too that say Libertarian Institute on them, so that everyone will know the origins of your oppositional defiant disorder and where they can listen to all the best podcasts.
So here's what you do.
Go to LibertasBella.com and look at all the great Libertarian Institute stuff they've got going there.
Find the ad in the right-hand margin at LibertarianInstitute.org.
LibertasBella.com.
You guys, check it out.
This is so cool.
The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out.
He's been working on this thing for years, and I admit I haven't read it yet.
I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it.
It's called Why the Vietnam War?
Nuclear Bombs and Nation-Building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61.
And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in, say, 1964 through 1974.
But how did we get there?
Why is this all Harry Truman's fault?
Find out in Why the Vietnam War?by the great Mike Swanson.
Available now.
Well, let me ask you this, Ray.
Not to do a whole two hours on this now or anything, but just to sort of sum up if you could.
There must be at least some people listening to this who say, you know what, I don't really object to any of this, but the real enemy is China because danger, danger, and that's the real rising new power, and now we must confront them or they're going to take over everything.
Yeah, well, on the one hand, I encourage my grandchildren to study Chinese because they will be a force to contend with.
On the other, if you know something about Chinese history, and I know less than I do about Russian history, but I know something.
Chinese are not an expansive power.
They feel threatened and they build up their armaments.
They got new ICBMs going in there.
But why?
Mostly as a deterrent to the bases they see surrounding China now by the US and by the bellicose attitude of admirals and generals who say, you know, China's next, or we're going to get China.
You know, even the war games show that we can't win a war against China, even the US war games.
So what is this all about?
It's about building more ships.
It's about developing more anti-ballistic missile systems.
It's about the military-industrial complex.
And that's really hard to get across to the American people when they're fed a steady diet of, right, China is a challenge, challenge.
China is trying to take over the world.
Well, you know, some decades hence, they will be the most powerful country in the world if the war lasts that long.
But why just so we can't get along, OK?
I refer back to that little vignette about my grandson's nursery school.
Why can't we learn how to share things, you know, limited resources, real problems with the environment?
Why don't we share the burdens of cleaning up as well as the burdens of fixing what is the quintessential existential problem?
It seems like it doesn't really shake out this way, but it should be the companies that are most invested in the war machine versus the companies who are most invested in international trade and keeping the peace.
And then the latter should win every time because what the hell, you know, let the arms dealers decide all the policies, you know?
Well, you know, it's not only the arms dealers, it's the people they pay in Congress.
You know, one of my favorite vignettes is Pope Francis comes to Congress, right, about five years ago or so.
And he says, you know, the main problem in the world is the the blood soaked arms trade.
And all these senators and representatives go, oh, yeah, way to go, Frank, way to go, you know.
And then they look in their pocket for the latest envelope from Raytheon over here and the one from Lockheed.
It was giving hypocrisy a bad name.
They're all in it, you know, and they all get elected or reelected depending on how much they cater to the military industrial complex.
So it's a real, real problem.
Eisenhower saw it 60 years ago.
He warned about it.
He didn't do much about it himself, but at least he recognized it.
He warned about it and he said the only way to combat it is an enlightened, a well, well educated citizenry.
And that's what you and I, I think, are trying to do.
In other words, get some truth out, spread a little truth around so people can think for themselves and say, well, you know, this mainstream media, there's a lot of BS.
China doesn't have to be our enemy just because everybody says it should be, just because it will become more powerful than we in the future.
The war is over.
Second World War is over.
We predominated for many, many decades.
Now, why can't we just take our normal place in the world and begin to share?
Ray, thanks so much for coming back on the show.
I always love talking with you.
Me too.
Thanks very much, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's the great Ray McGovern.
Find him at antiwar.com.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.