Judging Freedom - Scott Horton: Henry Kissinger, Unpacking the Good and Evil in Diplomacy.

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Scott Horton: Henry Kissinger, Unpacking the Good and Evil in Diplomacy. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, November 30th, 2023. Scott Horton joins us now Scott always a pleasure I was going to talk to you thank you my dear friend thanks for coming back to the show you are much appreciated by the host as well as by the folks that take the time to watch the show I had planned on talking when I was thinking about the show

last night to you about Israel and Hamas and we will in a little while but since that time Henry Kissinger died, and of course the establishment is just praising him to the skies, and I know you and I have a decidedly different view of him, and I suspect that most people watching us now do as well, but I'm going to guess that you are not surprised that the establishment is singing his praises, even though he's effectively been out of the scene for 20 or 25 years. Well, I mean, I think they have always regarded him as their wisest and greatest statesman, elder statesman. They call him the gray beards right at the Council on Foreign

Relations. And he's the oldest of old standbys. What do you think, Dr. Kissinger? They always ask. And what's ironic, of course, is that after all of the horror of his policies back when he was the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, advisor that in recent years he's been at least slightly less worse maybe even somewhat less worse than the neoconservatives and some of the worst hawks around him and has preached caution in in ways in fact um i found this essay judge that man i wish i had found this in 1999 in real time. And I'm kicking myself because my parents subscribed to Newsweek and I read Newsweek, you know, very regularly during that time.

And somehow I had just missed this. This would have really helped me and changed my point of view about so many things. And what it is, is it's an article called New World Disorder. And it's from right at the dawn of Bill Clinton's aggressive war against Serbia to break off Kosovo. And you can find it right now. Everyone, if you just search New World Disorder and Newsweek, it says by Newsweek staff, but that's just an artifact of the internet. And it's an article from 1999. It's Henry Kissinger. And you can tell when you read it.

And if you search deeper, you can find references to it in other places. It's definitely by him. And what is in there? What is in there that so astounds you? Yeah, he's just raking Bill Clinton over the coals for blowing up the New World Order. The whole thing was supposed to be this new era of cooperation under the UN. And here Bill Clinton was telling the UN and especially the Russians to get bent.

Our way or the highway. In other words, Bill Clinton was Dick Cheney before Dick Cheney ever showed up. And he was doing the Kosovo War over Russia's dead body in a way that was going to ruin all of Kissinger's and his patrons, the Rockefellers, grand plans for the new world order. And I don't necessarily mean a real one world government under the UN, but just certainly they had in mind over the long term cooperation with the Russians

rather than confrontation. And the Hawks took it away from them. According to a Cy Hirsch, Kissinger's nefarious behavior involving the government begins when he's a professor at Harvard and LBJ is calling him for advice. And he's interacting with the American negotiators in the Paris Peace Accords, but he's really a

double agent, again, according to Sy, because he's revealing to his future patron, Richard Nixon, what's going on in the Paris Peace Accords. And his purpose there, according to LBJ, what we assume LBJ thought, was to advise LBJ and the negotiators, but its true purpose there was to sabotage the negotiations so that there could be no peace accord between North Vietnam and the United States before the election in 1968 for fear that that would result in Hubert Humphrey defeating Richard Nixon. So, again, according to Cy Hirsch, a man whose work you and I, and most people watching and listening to us now, again, according to Cy Hirsch, a man whose work you and I and most people watching and listening to us now admire, Kissinger, when Nixon said running for president in 68, I have a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, he was alluding to the fact that he knew secrets about ending the war in Vietnam because he was getting them from Kissinger okay well you know I'm not I'm not sure what exactly what he

meant by that but I you know I think it was mostly just a gimmick but he was more importantly what you say is not only right but it went it was way worse than that Nixon and Kissinger hired a lady named Anna Chenault. Oh, right. And she warned the South Vietnamese that, you know, the Americans are negotiating secretly behind your back and ruin the talks. And we have and I'm sorry, I don't know where I know this from anymore. Judge, people just have to search. But I know you can find it. Oh, I guarantee you that Robert Perry wrote about this at consortiumnews.com. Okay. That's where you can read about this for one thing. And, um, and there's audio, uh, and

I've heard this audio judge of LBJ on the phone with a Republican Senator who was a friend of his. I'm sorry. I forget the guy's name now, but LBJ is saying this is treason. They ought not to be doing that. And the Republican senator says, you're right, Mr. President, I don't know what to say. But then he doesn't do anything about it. He doesn't do anything about it. Right. Here's Secretary Blinken this morning. I'm not sure where he is, but he's not in the U.S. He's somewhere in the Middle East when he learned that Henry Kissinger had died. So here's sort of an off the cuff, but over the top. He's the greatest predecessor that I've had and a man I admire most.

I'm sure you'll disagree with all of this, but here's Secretary Blinken on Henry Kissinger today. Secretary Kissinger really set the standard for everyone who followed in this job. I was very privileged to get his counsel many times, including as recently as about a month ago. He was extraordinarily generous with his wisdom, with his advice. Few people were better students of history. Even fewer people did more to shape history than Henry Kissinger. Well, he may be right in terms of shaping history, but the history that he shaped resulted in the deaths of millions of human beings in Vietnam and Cambodia, the overthrow of the popularly elected President

Salvador Allende and his murder in Chile, and arguably fomented Watergate by wiretapping his own staff and his urge for vengeance against the late, great Daniel Ellsberg. But I'll let you comment. I'm sorry for jumping in hey no problem enough for me yeah no no i love it judge and i agree with you completely and you know he played he was secretary of state and national security advisor under ford i guess he was just uh secretary of state under nixon um but he you know under both of them he was in charge of the secret war in luson cambodia where uh you know they're just carpet bombing these people and they had you know two sets of books the real coordinates for

the secret war and then the fake coordinates and you know it's in the movie i'm 99 sure it's in the documentary called the american holocaust about vietnam where they show congressional testimony of this colonel i guess guess, or captain or something. And he's saying, well, we kept bombing them because they just kept sending us bombs. And we didn't really have any more good targets. But like, what are we going to do? Let the tarmac just fill up with bombs? Like, we got to get rid of them somehow. So we just kept launching missions. And this thing was just on autopilot for years and years and years. And it was kept secret from the American people.

And of course, when the secret war in Cambodia was revealed, that was what led to the protests and then the killings at Kent State and all of that. It was a huge turning point in the war. And yeah, look, so, I mean, they had prolonged the war, their secret plan to prolong the war while claiming they had a secret plan to end it. And then what they did, they escalated and escalated for years. And then it is true that Nixon eventually did scale down and withdraw most of the infantry while escalating the air war and then, it was such an unmitigated disaster, such a horrible catastrophe for human life, for the government of the United States of America, for the Constitution of the United States of America, for truth. truth the pentagon papers revealed all this who the hell around today still defends vietnam but this monster now dead died yesterday or earlier today orchestrated it yeah almost no one

almost no one in fact even pat buchanan who is just a cold warrior to the bitter end admitted to tom woods on the show because tom said come on man i mean look at the coat the cultural revolution at home that you're so opposed to that came as a result of all the radicalism from the war like you gotta admit the blowback here for us would be enough to undermine the case for war there and pat kind of of says, yeah, I guess you're right, Tom. Even though he just wanted to hold the line against them commies so bad. But the reality was, and I was born in 76, Joe. So I was raised in the shadow of the war in Vietnam. And the way I always was raised to understand it in the 80s was that you're sending these guys to fight this counterinsurgency war against

guerrillas in a jungle. That's the craziest thing in the world that you could ask them to do. And then just look what happened. Everybody's just getting shot up. And body counts. You know, my dad told me that this was when Bush was lying us into a rock war, too, for Israel, by the way, more than anything. My dad said to me, boy, you think you're mad now. You'd have been completely out of your mind during Vietnam with the lies every single day.

They would show you, you know, via tape delay, but not by much um from earlier in the day you would see literally reporters reporting with film footage and there's piles of dead soldiers in the backgrounds sometimes dozens dozens hundreds were killed today and the reporter says hundreds of our guys were killed today and then right after him they do the pentagon briefing and the guy says well we lost eight guys but we killed 800 of them and it it's like, what? You are not exaggerating at all. Let's not forget 550,000 Americans rotated through military duty in Vietnam and 55,000 of them came home in body bags. Let's not forget that. And to what national security advantage was that?

Nothing. Just LBJ's vain, avaricious wish for a third term as a wartime president like his hero FDR. But Kissinger, steadfast to the end, made the following statements, a little difficult to understand him, but if you strain a little bit, you can. This is January of 2023. It's one of the last public statements he made, even though it's now November, almost December. So this is 11 months ago, made comments about Ukraine, in which he said, initially, I thought that Ukraine, that NATO should not be in Ukraine, but I've changed my mind. This will make your blood boil.

Take a listen, Scott. Before this war, I was opposed to membership of Ukraine in NATO, because I feared that it would start exactly the process that we are seeing now, now that this process has reached this level. The idea of a neutral Ukraine under these conditions is no longer meaningful. And at the end of the process that I described, it ought to be guaranteed by NATO in whatever forms NATO can develop.

But I believe Ukrainian membership in NATO would be an appropriate outcome. A neocon at the end of his life, after all the death and destruction that he caused. Scott, I didn't know about this change of heart. Of course, it's meaningless in terms of the geopolitical forces today, but it is interesting that he took the time to record that, one of his last public uh public statements yeah who in their right mind today except the lindsey grahams and victoria uh newlands and nicky haley's uh think that um ukraine should be in nato after all we've been

through i have to say like despite his garbled syntax and everything, I can't help but appreciate the fact that his statement was quite clear of what he meant. Anyone can go back and read his article that he wrote in the Washington Post in 2014. I think he might have even warned against it in 08, but certainly in 2014, he said we ought to work out a permanent deal that precludes the idea of Ukraine joining NATO to prevent this from happening, as he just stipulated there. But then to say in the middle of the war that, yeah, whenever this is over, we ought to go ahead and bring Ukraine into NATO. I mean, that right there, Mr. Grand Strategist, third and fourth dimensional chess and all of these things.

Doesn't just the fact of Henry Kissinger himself saying those words gives the Russian national security state that much more incentive and determination to leave nothing but a rump of Ukraineraine that america would not want to accept into nato or or or even go ahead and push their luck they do have time on their side to eventually if they you know can get to a point where they finally uh you know uh so-called broken ukrainian military power and just have the run of the place they It might just take the whole place. If you're being told that America and then, and the empire are definitely going to bring what's left of Ukraine into the alliance at the end of the war. Well,

you just telling them to keep the war going and leave a smaller and smaller rump of Ukraine left by the end. It's nuts. It is. So before, after he said Ukraine should be neutral, but before he came back to his neocon roots in that clip that we just saw, President Zelensky ripped into him. Now this is in Russian, so I will, maybe it's in Ukrainian. I'm not sure what language President Zelensky prefers, but whatever it is, I will read the subtitles. But this is very aggressive and quite interesting. Davos, for example, Mr. Kissinger has emerged from the deep past and said that part of Ukraine

should be given to Russia to avoid the alienation of Russia from Europe. It seems that Mr. Kissinger has 1938 on the calendar instead of 2022. And he thought that he was talking to an audience not in Davos, but in Munich at that time. And behind all these geopolitical speculations of those who advise Ukraine to give something away to Russia, great geopoliticians are always unwilling to see ordinary people, ordinary Ukrainians, millions of those who are living in the territory they proposed exchanging for an illusion of peace. You must always see people and remember that values are not just words. Now that was said in May of 22, as he

launched the spring offensive, which became a summer offensive, which became a non offensive, which led to the disaster of the loss of the conflagration in Ukraine, which is acknowledged by almost everybody except him. Yeah. You know, I don't know, man. It's a great trope. It works very well. You know, anyone who opposes American intervention in whichever crisis, they're always Neville Chamberlain at Munich attempting to appease Adolf Hitler. No one ever asked what Britain was supposed to do about Czechoslovakia at that time, you know, or what they could ever do. Of course, they were under after the Nazis were driven out, the commies owned them for another couple of generations after that. Britain was in no position to save Czechoslovakia. you. But anyway, this is what Justin Logan at the Cato Institute coined the phrase, the fallacy of

39, which is it's always, the enemy is always Hitler. And the model for dealing with the enemy is always the model that you would use with Hitler. And it doesn't matter whether you're talking about Saddam Hussein or David Koresh or Manuel Noriega or Assad or Gaddafi or Saddam or whoever. You can never talk with anyone ever. Otherwise, you're legitimizing them and you're appeasing them and you're giving in to them. And the only answer always is to resist this unmitigated, irrational evil. No matter who your enemy is, they're always unmitigated and irrational. And they only ever understand one thing for us. And that leaves us with only one option. And that is total victory. And yet, meanwhile, anyone who knows anything about this

and isn't just what some kind of liberal Democrat media partisan or Republican Senate lunatic like Lindsey Graham or, you know, someone that is an armed salesman or something like that that has some vested interest. Anyone could tell you Ukraine's going to lose this war. They're right next door. They have no giant moat or mountain range to protect them or anything. The Russians have a vastly larger country with a huge advantage in terms of population and in terms of industrial capacity. And yes, the Ukrainians do have the West to pour in high tech and, you know, some weapons to help level the balance a little bit but ultimately where are we at almost two years worth of war we're right where we were in what uh by march by by february by yeah by march of 22 where the russians control this much of the east and are threatening only to take more but then in March of 22, in March of 22,

or in March of 21, I guess, there was an agreement, an agreement between Ukraine and Russia for neutrality without a shot being fired with the 500,000 dead or disabled young Ukrainian men still healthy and alive until the West sabotaged it in that famous trip that Boris Johnson, then the prime minister of Great Britain, took to tell President Zelensky, don't shake hands, don't sign that thing because we have your back.

The U.S. and Great Britain have your back, which almost brings us back to where we started. As murderous as he was, Kissinger did famously utter a truism. It is dangerous to be an enemy of the United States. It is worse to be its friend. Yeah, absolutely right about that. And and you know the ukrainians were fools to go along with the united states on this again it was is just written in the simple arithmetic that they can't win this war the only question is whether they're going to lose harkiv and odessa or whether they're going to be able to hang on to them again and if they are going to join this consensus that no matter what they're pushing

for NATO membership from here on, then that means the Russians then have that much more incentive to just continue the war on indefinitely at the expense of the poor people of that country. And it's just so unfortunate. And now, by the way, since you mentioned that, and people can read up on this at antiwar.com, We have more and more and more sources coming out, including Zelensky's ministers, people from inside his government confirming that story of what we know about the talks in Turkey and all that was going on in March of 22, which was already widely reported in Ukrainian Pravda and had been confirmed in other places about the talks going on and about the intervention by the U.S. and the British in order to end that war.

And we know from just the Washington Post, they said at that time they were so impressed with Ukraine's initial success in resisting the Russians that they said, OK, great, let's just accelerate it then. Let's keep the thing going. And had kind of already switched to Plan B at that time. And then look for all the good that it's done. And look, even for the strategy where they said openly, we want to replicate what we did to the Soviets in Afghanistan. Never mind what, you know, Al-Qaeda and their friends did to America, replicating that in Afghanistan in the meantime. But we want to do that again. And we're going to bog the Russians down and create this huge expense for them. And it's going to, you know, ruin their

country. We'll do them just like Carter and Reagan did them in the 80s. And yet you look at it, who has gone deeper into debt on all their spending on all the weapons for this war? It's the USA and our European allies have spent way far, far more than the Russians have spent, maybe double what the Russians have spent for their cost of the war. All the while they had their own domestic arms industry that they're building up here. And they have essentially an export economy of timber and energy and what have you to the rest of Asia. If we kick them all the way out of Europe, fine. They just sell everything to the East. And so their budget is, I don't know that

everything is perfect over there, Judge. I'm sure that the war is costing them a lot. But in terms of the race for who's bleeding themselves to bankruptcy through this policy in Ukraine. Not even a close call. Not even. I call. Not even. I think it's America. Whoops. I think it's America and our allies are way out ahead on losing this thing. Scott Horton, always a pleasure.

Love the passion. Love the insight. Love your tremendous knowledge of the history. Thanks very much for joining us. Thank you very much, Judge. Appreciate you. Of course. A great man. Coming course. A great man. Coming

up, a great man. Four o'clock Eastern, the inimitable Scott Ritter. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!