All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Daniel Larrison, Contributing Editor at antiwar.com, and he's got this great and important new piece for you to read called What Nord Stream 2 Means for NATO Expansion.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Daniel?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me on again.
Yeah, absolutely.
Great to talk to you.
So what's Nord mean, and what's Nord Stream 2?
Right, so the Nord Stream 2, this is the second pipeline, as the name suggests, the second pipeline for natural gas supplies running from Russia into Western Europe.
This one in particular goes to Germany through the Baltic Sea, and the reason that it's caused such a hubbub is in the view of, say, the Polish and Ukrainian governments, this pipeline is a way of going around Ukraine and supplying energy directly to Europe without having to pay Ukraine transit fees, and they see this as a potential threat to Ukraine, and a lot of people in Congress have bought into this argument and see Nord Stream 2 as this terrible threat to Europe, which it really isn't, and the Germans have been buying energy from the Russians going all the way back into the Cold War, so it's not like this is some sort of new problem or a new issue, really.
The Germans are essentially going for the more efficient, more modern pipeline to guarantee their supplies of energy going into the future.
Biden was initially threatening to sanction the company that was working with the Russians on this, the Germans were extremely opposed to that, and so there was a real chance that Biden was going to blow up the relationship with the Germans, or at least damage it badly enough to be a real problem, and in the end, Biden decided that harming the relationship with Germany wasn't worth making the gesture against this pipeline, which was practically finished anyway.
It's not like the sanctions were ever going to stop it in the first place, and so the point that I make in the piece about Nord Stream 2 is that if the US isn't willing to pick a fight with its European allies over something as minor as this pipeline, the US and its allies in Europe definitely aren't going to be picking a fight with Russia over Ukraine, and this is why we can be quite certain that Ukraine is never going to get into NATO, at least not with the governments being the way they are in Europe right now.
So I use the pipeline as an example of how unimportant Ukraine is to the US and Germany, and why they don't want to take big risks on their behalf, and that has real direct implications for whether they would support NATO membership for Ukraine, and I think it's clear that in practice, they don't.
The Germans are explicit about this.
We keep pretending that the door is open, but I think we all know that it really isn't.
Okay, so let me just ask you what I guess amounts to a parenthesis here in terms of the politics, but I don't know, but I remember reading that during the Trump years, part of this had to do with Texas natural gas companies wanting to ship natural gas in ships over to Germany at whatever inflated prices compared to what they could buy from Russia, and that that was a big part of this, or some part of it.
What do you think about that?
I think that there is something to that.
That was something that was motivating a lot of the anxiety or concern about Nord Stream 2, and it's not a coincidence that one of the biggest critics of the new pipeline is Ted Cruz from Texas, and when Texas energy interests are threatened, Cruz will suddenly become very motivated, even in ways that you wouldn't expect him to be.
When the Saudis were waging their oil war, he suddenly became very critical of the Saudis, which had never happened before.
In this case, he's throwing quite a fit and holding up pretty much all senior State Department nominees from the Biden administration in protest over Biden's decision not to sanction the pipeline, and I assume that it has something to do with wanting to supply Europe with localized natural gas from the U.S., but I think there's also just a lot of knee-jerk anti-Russian sentiment behind all of this, and so if they see something as being potentially beneficial to Russia, or if they see it as something that they can attack in order to poke Russia in the eye, that's what they're going to do.
Well, you know, it seems kind of strange when they're so invested in being the dominant power in Europe and getting the Germans and the French to go along with the Americans and see the Americans as the responsible party there, when they're being the irresponsible party when Germany and Russia are trying to get along and we're trying to get away, in the way of that, so that we can do what, you know, you write in the article, is the most destabilizing thing that they could do, which would be to try to bring Ukraine into NATO and change the relationship, the military relationship of this country with that one to such a severe degree.
Yeah, definitely, and I think we've seen that especially NATO expansion, trying to push into the former Soviet Union, has been especially destabilizing.
We managed to get away with it by bringing in the Baltic states, because at the time the Russians weren't in a position to do much about it, and then the expansionists got a bit greedy and thought that they could keep pushing and pushing without generating any reaction.
We've seen, obviously, with the 2008 war and then the war in Ukraine, that Russia will push back, and that Russia does effectively have a veto over membership for these countries.
We've already proven that we're not willing to fight for them, and indeed that we can't fight for them.
These countries are, as far as the alliance and the US are concerned, indefensible and not worth fighting for either.
That's really what has been driven home over the last decade, and I think that has sunk in in Washington and in Brussels, but nobody wants to actually own up to it and admit it yet.
You have the Ukrainian government still running around, just this week their foreign minister wrote that piece in Foreign Affairs that I was responding to, essentially telling the US and Europe that they have to let Ukraine in, because it's as if they don't have a choice in the matter.
They made this promise to them once upon a time, and now they have to fulfill it no matter what.
And I think the Ukrainian government is the only one that still believes that.
Well, yeah, I hope that's right.
This goes back, I guess, to Victoria Nuland's famous statement in the leaked phone call there, that F the EU, right?
If the Germans don't want to get on board for making all this happen, well, we'll just do it ourselves, and we'll get this guy Robert Sary from the United Nations to come in and help us.
And then run around the Germans and see this coup through.
And then after that led to a horrible war that lasted for a couple of years, I guess it's still ongoing, and some low-level fighting.
But it was really, if I remember it right, this would have been in 2016, maybe 15, when — 14, I think, is when she said that, yeah.
Yeah, no, but, oh yeah, no, no, no, that was, yeah, right before the coup, but I'm saying it was in, I guess it was in late 15, or in 2016, when Merkel and Holland came to D.C. and told Obama, listen, we're going to go negotiate the Minsk 2 deal — Oh, yes.
It must have been in 2016 — to do the Minsk 2 deal with Putin to put an end to the war.
And Obama said, okay, fine, go ahead.
And that policy had led to such a disaster here.
But I guess, well, if there's a question there, it's how far outside of the consensus was Nuland when she did that, and when they precipitated that coup compared to what the Germans and the French were willing to go along with at that time, do you think?
Well, I think the — Because they helped, too, didn't they, the EU, at the time, with the coup?
Well, the EU was pushing for Ukraine to join that agreement with them at the time.
I mean, that became sort of the flashpoint in the months leading up to that.
Right.
In practical terms, I don't know how much support they really provided.
In terms of Nuland's position, I think when she was taking that position, she did actually speak for a bipartisan consensus in Washington that still thought that we could yank Ukraine into our sphere of influence, out of Moscow's orbit, and do so successfully.
And I think what we found is that, again, the Russians have a say in this, and they can take moves to counter that effort, and they did so.
So yes, you've got a, quote-unquote, pro-Western government in Kiev now, but a country that's in much worse shape than it was just a few years earlier.
So it's hardly a great success.
Yeah.
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And that, I think we're just going to have to at least tacitly accept that as the new reality.
Where I think there is some room for possible improvement or, you know, a change, a move away from the sort of confrontational politics we've seen over the last few years is if Russia can pull back some of its support for the separatist republics in eastern Ukraine, and then you can get some kind of durable political settlement going, that seems like the only way forward for Ukraine to recover from this period of conflict.
Yep.
All right, well, now, so what do you make of all the American shows of strength in the Black Sea and all of that, too?
Is the Biden administration really, well, I mean, they're backing down on this, but they keep ratcheting up all of what Trump was doing with his escalations there over, I don't know exactly where Obama left it, but I think it was an advent of the Trump that they started really escalating these bomber runs, testing Russian radars and this kind of thing, right?
Yeah, well, I think you do have with Biden a generally more confrontational Russia policy, or at least as confrontational as Trump's was in practice.
As much as he gets criticized by Republicans for being, you know, supposedly soft on Russia or not taking as hard of a line as they would like, in practice, he's sanctioning them.
He's not really budging on any of the issues where there are disputes, and so while he talks about wanting de-escalation, he wants diplomatic engagement, so that's what he keeps saying, he's not actually showing any willingness to compromise or accommodate with Russia at all, and I think that's a mistake.
That's not going to get the U.S. anything.
It's not going to make the region more stable, and it's going to keep feeding into the Russian fear that the U.S. is still trying to pull one over on them.
Yeah.
All right, well, listen, man, I'm sorry I screwed up and called you late, and so now I think we better cut it early here.
I gotta go to my next guy, but thank you so much for doing the show again.
It's great to talk to you, and again, it's always wonderful to have you writing for us at Antiwar.com, too.
Yeah.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
I appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that's Daniel Larrison.
Check out his great piece here.
It's called, What Nord Stream 2 Means for NATO Expansion.
