All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am 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 I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing the great James Carden from the Committee for East-West Accord.
He's the Executive Editor there, and he has an important article at braveneweurope.com, which first time I've ever read anything at this site, I bet it's the Russians.
It's by Marshall Auerbach and James Carden.
The rotten alliance of liberals and neocons will likely shape U.S. foreign policy for years to come.
That's it.
I'm packing up my things.
I'm moving to Australia.
Welcome to the show.
How you doing, James?
I'm all right.
How about yourself?
I'm doing all right.
You're bumming me out, because I know that you're right about this.
The neocons are all going home to the Democratic Party.
They're leaving a bunch of hawks behind them in the Republican Party, too, and they're just going to make the Democrats that much worse than they already were, which was horrible.
Yeah, that's right.
This has been something that's been going on since before the 2016 election, when a number of high-profile neocons began to signal that they were ready to desert the Republican Party and back Hillary Clinton.
I became quite alarmed when Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution decided that he was going to headline a fundraiser for Hillary in early 2016.
You could see that this was kind of the beginning of the never-Trumper movement.
Of course, the neocons, not a lot of people know this.
You certainly do.
The neocons actually came from the Democratic Party when they began to form in the late 60s in response to domestic disturbances, the takeover of universities and the like in the late 60s.
They only migrated to the Republican Party in the late 70s, early 80s, because of Reagan's hardline stand against the Soviet Union.
They're back in their party of origin, and that's particularly troubling to someone like myself, who's a registered Democrat, but certainly anti-intervention, almost a neo-isolationist.
The space for people like myself is increasingly small and more marginalized now than ever before because the party is now host to neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who now are basically the same thing.
That's where we are, and it's pretty troubling.
I wonder, because obviously the politics of Barack Obama did so much to mute criticism about foreign policy from the left, since he, on the face of it, answered all their hope and change type feelings without actually changing the policy.
In fact, he only made things that much worse.
And then the politics of Russiagate have pretty obviously also served to short circuit the liberals as well, since the problem with Trump is that he's not patriotic enough, according to the CIA and the FBI, who are our wonderful protectors and this kind of crap.
So I get why they've, for partisan reasons, they've been kind of pushed to silence on opposition to these wars and that kind of thing.
But at the same time, I don't know, for example, they turned out for pretty big protests after Trump killed Soleimani, and they held some leftist-led protests against the war there.
Or against the danger of war there.
And maybe would have reminded some people on the liberal left that, oh yeah, this is part of what we're about, right?
The legacy, at least since Vietnam, of being the Dove Party.
And they must know how dangerous the possibility of any more of these wars are, if only for their own political fortunes by now, right?
But somehow they just don't seem to care about that?
Well, I think it depends on what group we're talking about, right?
So if we're talking about mainstream Clintonite liberals, the answer is no, because they never knew it.
They've always been every bit as hawkish as your average moderate Republican.
If we're talking about progressives on the left, yeah, I think you're right.
Early on, it seemed like the left was going to at least try to produce a real alternative to what Trump was offering.
I remember in the very early days, there was a rather large, spirited protest that took place outside the White House protesting the travel ban.
Trump cherry-picked a couple of Arab nations, though notably not Saudi Arabia, and this allowed people to travel into the country.
I'm not a take-it-to-the-streets type of person, but I even participated in that rally.
But what happened over the course of the next three to four years is that even the progressive left got swept up in Russiagate.
They got swept up in it every bit as much as your moderate liberals.
So today, the alternative that is presented to us on the left, and this is something that Marshall and I touch upon in the piece, is that the progressive alternative really isn't much of an alternative at all, and we can get into the reasons why I believe that.
And it's sort of a heretical position to take for someone who writes for the nation, or used to write for the nation, pretty regularly.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, speaking of the nation, I mean, so this is a magazine that, you correct me if I'm wrong, but pretty much on the spectrum, they're right at the line between the acceptable liberals and the actual progressives with some principle.
But they usually sort of side on the side of principle, right?
That was true under Katrina Vanden Heuvel.
I'm not really sure what's going on.
Oh, she's not the editor anymore?
She's the publisher.
There's a new editor there.
I see.
I know that they did publish some crazy Russiagate stuff too, but yeah.
So now here's the- Oh, go ahead.
Well, yeah, the debate inside the magazine was sort of interesting and sort of, I guess, reflective of what was going on in the larger left community.
There were a handful of us who, led by the esteemed Professor Stephen F. Cohen, who thought mainly that Russiagate was a load of nonsense and was a distraction and a dangerous one at that.
A lot of the rank and file staff writers and staff at the magazine were appalled by that, and they really thought that Trump was an agent of the Kremlin and a Putin puppet.
It turns out that, I think anyway, we'll see what the John Durham report, and I think as we've already seen with the debunking of the Steele dossier, that the skeptics of Russiagate were absolutely correct.
After all, Robert Mueller, in his own report, said that there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
But this Russiagate lives on, and it seems as though it will never die.
It might go away in the unlikely event Joe Biden wins in November, but I just saw today that Peter Strzok has a book coming out very soon.
So that lives on, and unfortunately, Russiagate has really tainted the views of the majority, I would say, of the liberal left intelligentsia in this country.
Yeah.
And boy, it just shows them to be so disconnected to me when ...
It seems like the base, and I don't know the numbers on this exactly, but it seems like Trump is radicalizing everybody, so maybe he's radicalizing the progressives into being dumb enough to believe in Russiagate for a little while or something like that, but at the same time, he's sort of radicalizing everybody on the left to move one step to the left, that kind of thing.
And yet, the party seems to only want to reach out to Republicans and try to get Republicans to vote for Joe Biden the way they tried to get Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton, by bringing Robert Kagan and Eliot Cohen along.
That's going to make Republicans ...
Look, all of George W. Bush and John McCain's best guys say, vote Biden.
Well, that's how Trump won four years ago.
The National Review did that cover article where they had essays by every prominent conservative writer they could find, like 75 of them or something, saying, whatever you do, don't vote for Trump.
Sign the people who lied to you into Iraq.
And then they lost.
They might as well have been working for Trump.
And I mean, I get it that people are stuck in their own heads looking out their own eyeballs and all of that, but it seems like they could have a little bit more wisdom that they're going to need for the left to show up, and they're going to have to have something to be excited for other than just the removal of Trump.
They're going to have to have something to vote for, and yet they're being told, screw you.
You get Kamala Harris and George W. Bush.
I mean, well, I love that you brought up National Review because I always fondly remember the cover story that they ran, I think it was back in like 2005, called Why We're Winning in Iraq, which is fantastic stuff.
Yeah, they also ran by their editor, Jonah Goldberg, Baghdad to Linda Est, part one and two, where he talks all about the Ledeen Doctrine, which says every 10 years or so, you have to take some poor small country and slam it up against the wall just to show everybody else that we mean business.
Right, show it a lesson, that tough guy, notorious tough guy, Jonah Goldberg.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, here's the thing, though, getting back to your question, sadly, I think because of Russiagate and because of Trump derangement syndrome, the left really doesn't care about matters of war and peace at this point, right?
They're onto other things.
So you're right that it's sort of ridiculous that Biden is basically taking a page out of the Hillary Clinton playbook in terms of spending energy and money trying to attract- But you're saying that might not hurt, actually, because the leftists really aren't going to be bothered by a bunch of George W. Bush war hawks endorsing their guy, the more the merrier, huh?
Yeah, yeah, I think so, because they're onto other things, as we've seen over the past months since the George Floyd murder.
And Russiagate has convinced large parts of the left that, you know, we should be in a new Cold War and hawkish policies are OK because Trump himself is not really a hawk, even though he surrounded himself with the worst kinds of neocons.
If Trump is for something, then we should be against it.
So if Trump wants to pull out of Afghanistan, he shouldn't be allowed to do it because that will somehow please Putin.
If Trump wants to withdraw troops from Germany, well, we should be against that because that will also somehow please Putin.
That's the way the left thinks about foreign policy right now.
And it's really, really troubling.
So no, I don't think that these open letters that we've seen with these former national security people from the George W. Bush administration are going to, I don't think that's going to turn off the leftists at all.
You know, I wonder if this creates any new space on the right for, you know, less hawkish voices.
I kind of think not.
Right.
There's enough hawks on the right without the neocons.
And the neocons, it sounds like the Democrats don't really need them either, but they'll sure be at home there representing that Hillary Clintonite point of view there from now on, I guess.
Well, as my co-author Marshall and I noted in the piece, you could sort of see a few years down the road a scenario where the Republican Party, if it kind of pursues a Trumpism without people call it national conservatism, where you have people like Josh Hawley or Rand Paul or someone like Colonel Douglas MacGregor, you could see the Republicans becoming kind of the party of restraint and realism.
And the Biden Democrat, the Biden, Rice, Power, Harris, Chelsea Clinton Democratic Party becomes the hardline militarist party.
Have mercy, Chelsea Clinton.
Can you imagine?
I swear I'm going to give up and just move out of this country at some point just from the disgust.
I leave my TV off.
That's helping.
But yeah.
Yeah.
I don't watch cable news anymore.
Here's the thing about this, man.
This all sounds to me like a perfect opportunity for a major crack up in political exploitation by the forces of good here if they can play their cards right.
It's the same thing with the split over Israel-Palestine, where the left half of the party really is good on this and really have decided to count the Palestinians as American blacks or something where they're supposed to get a fair shake for change.
So that's one really good thing on their side.
And it seems like the legacy of Vietnam and Iraq War Two are not completely dead among, you know, real liberals and leftists and progressives out in the world, never mind the party establishment.
So I mean, it just seems to me like Donald Trump's advantage right here, which he could do because he's the one sitting in that chair, is he could say he's ordering all the troops home from Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Syria right now, and he dares the Democrats to do anything about it.
And then he would win because that would force the Democratic Party, you know, led by Joe Biden to attack him from the right on all those wars in such a way that, you know, they can try to say he's all doing it for Vladimir Putin or whatever, but the Americans want these wars ended.
And the people who used to, you know, who somewhere in the back of their mind remember that they sided with Cindy Sheehan when after she lost her son and one of the rest of the boys brought home safe as soon as possible, you know, it's going to be hard to get them to side with Biden over Trump over that.
Not that they would show up for Trump, probably, but they might just stay home if Biden spends the last six or eight weeks of the campaign attacking Trump for pulling us out of wars.
Not that I think Trump could do that or would do that, but just it seems like there's such opportunity to exploit there, you know, because and maybe I'm not cynical enough.
I think what happens is Twitter skews everything where those aren't the real people, right?
Those are just the Twitter people.
In the real world, liberals and progressives and leftists don't like war.
Maybe so.
I mean, I think that an important lesson to draw, you mentioned Twitter, an important lesson to draw from the primary campaign this year was that, yeah, liberal left Twitter does not even is not even close to reflecting what the real world is all about, because those people talk to each other 24-7 and they had each other convinced that Bernard Sanders was going to be the nominee easily, and instead it was a Biden blowout and they were all shocked.
And so my takeaway from that was to pay absolutely no attention to any of that, because it's just an echo chamber and it's a silly echo chamber at that.
Right.
It's the same thing with all the race wars and everything like, okay, I understand they've had riots in some towns and that kind of deal, but the average person go out into your town and there's no problems.
There's no lynchings.
There's no fights.
There's no nothing.
Everything's fine.
And so, yeah, the medium is the message a lot of the time.
But yeah, anyway, I don't know.
I think you're right about the national conservatism and the potential there.
But of course, there's so many far right wingers.
And we just ran a great article by Ramsey Baroud, for example, about the Christian right and Israel, where their obsession isn't even really about the actual Israel that exists in time and space at all.
It's all just this pretend Sunday school narrative that requires the Palestinians to not be people worth notice, essentially.
And that there's such a strong, they're not the majority or anything, but there's such a huge and important block of Republican voters that they will always get their way on that.
And that means not just support for Israel over the Palestinians, but that means support for the American empire in the Middle East forever, because that's what they think is good for Israel.
Yeah.
I mean, the one thing I thought that this is many years ago.
But I thought the one weakness of the Walt and Mearsheimer book, The Israel Lobby, was that they didn't pay enough attention to or emphasize enough of the power of the evangelical Zionists in this country.
And actually, Andrew Bacevich has written in his book, The New American Militarism, really goes into that.
And I would recommend people to look at that.
I think they are really the most powerful Israel lobby in this country.
There's certainly a solid block.
And I'll tell you what, I don't know if you saw this, but The Forward had an investigative piece the day before yesterday by Aidan Pink about the Israeli government bankrolling, not just Jewish liberal leaning Israel lobby organizations in DC, but bankrolling the Christians United for Israel, John Hagee and the Cornerstone Church down there in San Antonio, which is he's the leader really, the kingpin of that whole movement, the most powerful force within it anyway, directly on the payroll of the Israeli government.
And what were we saying about foreign interference?
It's really bothersome, except when it's Israel, in which case we pretend that it doesn't exist at all, I guess.
Or Saudi Arabia.
Yeah.
I like how that was even the actual scandal with Mike Flynn, had nothing to do with working for the Russians.
It was all about, he was asking the Russians for a favor on behalf of Israel to ask them to veto a UN Security Council resolution against their illegal occupation of the West Bank.
And the Russians told him no, far from giving him instructions, he asked them to do something for him.
And they were like, yeah, right.
So, some collusion story there, except the part about the Israelis getting to him somehow and having him ask that favor.
We never got to hear that side of the story.
No, the Atlantic Magazine is not going to cover that.
No, pray not.
You have the leading progressive foreign policy intellectual slash operative by the name of Matt Duss, who, in a recent interview with Jacobin Magazine, said this, and we have this in the article, he said that the United States has neither the right nor the ability to transform other countries, but we should do what we can to protect and expand the political space in these countries for local people to do that work.
Well, what is, that doesn't sound...
That's Bernie's guy, right?
Matt Duss.
Right.
Right.
He's Bernie's chief foreign policy advisor.
Well, sentiments like that, or they actually contradict the spirit of the UN Charter.
And my view is that any progressive foreign policy alternative has to start with the principles of the UN Charter and the principles of non-interference in the affairs of other countries.
And we have to get back to recognizing that sovereignty really matters.
And we can't go around deciding how other countries should run themselves.
And when we don't like it, we certainly can't just decide to violate their borders and use our military to try to overthrow their governments.
I mean, right now we have troops in Syria in violation of international law.
Now people will say, particularly people on the liberal left will say, well, Russians have troops in Syria, so...
But the big difference is, is that the Russians are there at the request of the sovereign Syrian government.
So it's legal under international law.
We are not there at the request of the sovereign Syrian government.
So we are in violation of international law.
So we have to get back to appreciating the concept of sovereignty, and if we don't, we're going to remain in the mess that we've been in for the past 30 years.
And progressive foreign policy thinkers deride ideas like this.
And Duss actually, in the interview with Jacobin Magazine, basically says that the idea of respecting sovereignty is actually an authoritarian idea.
So I don't really see much hope in the way of the left getting its act together and producing a really, producing a foreign policy alternative that would actually make a difference.
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Man, yeah, that's really a bummer.
In previous times, I followed Matt Duss on Twitter and saw his stuff.
He was never great, but that's a little bit disappointing, frankly.
I didn't think he was quite that bad.
Because if you accept the premise that, oh, what, it's authoritarian to not overthrow an authoritarian government, but somehow the righteousness of our intervention must never be questioned, that's not authoritarian at all, to choose a government of a foreign country or to send billions of dollars of Soros bucks to support organizations that build up political dissent over whichever sovereign government we don't like, again, look at how America goes completely crazy over the myth that Russia did this to us in 2016, every bit of which has fallen apart, just like the case against Iraq.
There's nothing left of it, and yet look at the absolute panic over it.
But no, we can do this to everybody else, and it's just no problem.
And that's the liberal Democrats talking.
They would have been, I don't know, a bit more circumspect about that stuff in times past, right?
Like even in Iraq War II, Biden was a full-throated supporter, but it seems like a lot of the Democrat senators were kind of dragged along on that, and their heart wasn't quite in it the way his was.
I'm thinking like John Kerry, and even Hillary Clinton, but it wasn't like her parade the way it was Biden's.
Kerry, you know, Kerry, there's an account of Kerry at a dinner party in the run-up to the Iraq War, and some famous lefty, I don't know who it was, said to him, you know, you really can't do this, you can't support it.
And he said, of course I have to support it.
I want to run for president in 04.
And that was why he lost.
He wouldn't even run against the war while he was running for president.
He couldn't even say, look, I made a mistake supporting it, now I'm going to end it, which would have won him the presidency.
On matters of foreign policy, it seems to me that the Democratic establishment simply can't get out of its own way.
And because of that, I'm fairly confident that Mr. Trump will be reelected.
And it brings me no joy to say that, by the way, but I just don't see, if Biden continues to take every play out of the Hillary Clinton playbook, which he seems to be doing, there's no good reason to think that he's going to emerge victorious in November.
You heard it here first, folks.
Yeah, no, I'm with you, I think.
And after all, he doesn't have to highlight war, but to run only on I'm not him, when that was exactly Hillary's entire campaign to 2016 and it wasn't enough, he's got to offer something, you know?
But a little bit less chaos than what we've got right now is not going to push him over the edge.
It's like trying to run Mitt Romney against Barack Obama.
It's true that a lot of people hated Barack Obama, but a lot of people really loved him.
But nobody loved Mitt Romney.
And that was the margin, right?
There was no dedicated support for Romney, just hatred for Obama.
That was never going to be the margin of victory.
And it's the same thing with Trump.
A lot of people hate Trump, no question about that, but he's got his core support.
Who's Biden's core support besides the Kagan family and the coffin industry?
Well, Wall Street, all their money is going to Biden this time, with the exception of Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman.
So he's very heavily backed by Wall Street.
But I think the other mistake that Biden is making is running a campaign where it's basically saying, well, I'm going to return integrity to the White House.
That's not going to work, because when he talks about things like that, what he's not talking about are jobs, right?
He's not talking about the economy.
And he's going to waste all his time talking about how he's the morally superior person to Donald Trump, which I suppose is true.
But it doesn't matter, because when you don't have a job, when you're on food stamps, when your child is addicted to opioids, when you've been thrown out of your house because you can't pay your rent, it doesn't really matter much if you have more integrity than Donald Trump.
Because guess what?
An ant, a dog, has more integrity than Donald Trump.
It doesn't matter.
It didn't work in 2016.
It's not going to work now.
So anyway, I don't know.
And Donald Trump's negatives sure are high, and he is such a complete basket case that God knows what he could do between now and November to sabotage his own chances.
But I agree with you that the way it is, the Democrats are not putting together a game strong enough to beat him.
Not right now.
And you think about it, too.
If they had nominated Bernie Sanders, who's not had a terrific record on war overall, if they had nominated him, he would have been in the position to really attack Trump on war because he actually did go to heroic lengths to try to and to succeed in getting the War Powers Resolution passed by the House and the Senate.
He really took the lead on that.
And he's actually quite a bit better on a few of the wars than Trump and could credibly attack Trump from the left on the wars, which is what the American people overall, the polls say in the super majorities.
That's what we want to hear.
Even the soldiers who fought in the Iraq and Afghan wars say they never should have fought in them.
They never should have attacked those countries.
And the war should end right now.
So they gave away a big opportunity there.
Joe Biden is in no position to attack Trump, even for Trump's worst thing, the genocide in Yemen, because it was Biden and Obama who started it.
So he can say, well, I'm against it, but he can't make a full-throated case against the war in the campaign.
No, because he doesn't, because he doesn't believe it either.
Right.
I think, you know, a lot of I think Biden and the people that Biden has surrounded himself with believe that Trump is probably too dovish.
So they're very anxious to get back in there and light things up.
You saw the recent interview with Antony Blinken, right?
Blinken is Biden's top foreign policy advisor.
And Blinken clearly wants another bite at the apple in Syria, calling it the failure for the United States to, quote unquote, do more in Syria was his biggest regret.
These people are completely crazy.
Or I guess that's not it, right?
It's just the bubble, right?
There's not anyone in this guy's life that he drinks with that can scream at him that Jabhat al-Nusra are sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City, which makes you a traitor.
I mean, you know, this is something that they are able to, I guess, compartmentalize.
There's a leaked State Department email from Jake Sullivan, who was Hillary Clinton's top foreign policy advisor.
And he was the head of the policy planning staff when she was secretary of state.
And he acknowledged in the email that AQ is on our side in Syria, AQ, al-Qaeda.
So they're able to, I guess they just are able to push that stuff off to one side because they see Assad as the bigger threat, which is manifestly ridiculous.
More of the same.
That's a preview of a Biden administration.
That's what we have to look forward to.
Yep.
Good old Michelle Flournoy that lost the war in Afghanistan after tripling it.
She will be the secretary of defense, they've already said.
Yeah.
Blinken will be national security advisor.
I guess Susan Rice will probably be secretary of state.
And then I was going to say Ghislaine Maxwell.
But well, did you see the one?
This got very little coverage, but Hillary Clinton gave Ghislaine Maxwell's nephew a job in the State Department.
Guess what?
Working on regime change in Libya and Syria.
I did see that.
Yeah.
The Office of Near Eastern Affairs.
Yeah, I did see that.
Wouldn't that be funny if Biden pardoned her and then Hillary Clinton gave her and her nephew jobs in the State Department again?
Why not?
Doing regime change for Israel and Syria?
Do some honey traps on the side?
I bet you could get Bill Clinton to endorse that policy.
It's a decadent empire that we live in, isn't it?
It's really something else.
Bill Clinton's roaming free right now.
That ought to tell you all you need to know.
All right, man.
I'm sorry.
I don't want to interrupt your afternoon, but I've had a great time talking with you, James.
It's good to have you back on the show.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks for having me.
All right, you guys.
That's James Carden.
Writes at The Nation and is the executive editor of the Committee for East-West Accord.
You should sign up for their email list.
He sends out great articles pertaining to Eastern European and Russian issues every morning.
That's the Committee for East-West Accord.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
