Judging Freedom - U.S. Seeking Perpetual War in Ukraine? w/ Alastair Crooke fmr Brit ambassador

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

U.S. Seeking Perpetual War in Ukraine? w/ Alastair Crooke fmr Brit ambassadorSee 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, August 31st, 2023. Where does the summer go? Alistair Crook joins us now. Alistair, my dear friend, always a pleasure. You have a great piece out, and all your pieces are great. This one is profoundly moving and has given me lots of ideas for things to discuss with you. But you have a title that Hotel Ukraine. You're a checkout anytime but you can never leave. You of course are mimicking the lines from the great American folk song Hotel California. Relax said the night man we are programmed to receive you can check out any time you like but you can never leave. Are you talking about American military support in Ukraine?

I'm talking about the West in Ukraine. I'm talking about the fact that it's much easier to get into these exercises, into these projects, and checking out is much, much more difficult. And in fact, I finish it off by saying, actually, you know, the authors of the Maidan coup and the Maidan project. That's Mrs. Newland and her colleagues. Miss Newland and her crew and her colleagues on that are actually, they've turned the world inside out. And they are not going to be able to check out or leave the new world order that they've created inadvertently.

Do you think that President Biden is actually becoming more realistic and maybe looking for an off-ramp here, maybe freeze the conflict and claim victory or what? Another example of America's perpetual wars? I think the dynamics in Washington and the dynamics in Kiev are changing quite profoundly. The dynamics in Washington are changing. You know more about it than me, because I think that the Ukraine issue, particularly the question of the purchase of influence and Viktor Shokin, evidence and other, Burisma, all of this is, I think, will have the effect of pushing the Democratic Party to say, you know, let's move on. Let's draw a line under this. We don't want this to be, you know, contaminating the election campaign right through to next year. So I think in that

way, I mean, the threat of an inquiry by Congress, I think, which will, of course, bring up all these things about Ukraine, will push towards bringing some sort of conclusion. Even though I think Washington is divided, one faction would like to get an off-ramp to negotiate, push Kiev into negotiating directly with Russia and quickly so that they can say, we've won, it's all over, mission accomplished, now let's get on with the campaign. And the other ones who say, you know, we can't afford to be seen to be retreating on this issue. We have to keep it going. Even if it's a little bit, let's follow the Israeli example and just keep it going with lots of money and weapons for this period. And what I'm really saying is neither of these options, neither of them is workable. Not the off-ramp. There's going

to be no frozen conflict. The Russians will not do that. And I don't think that it's feasible also to try and pursue that alternative of a long, protracted, quagmire-type operation against Russia, because that will end up in a war. There's no doubt about it, because the West doesn't have anything new or substantial to throw into this Ukrainian mix at the moment that would change the strategic calculus, except by escalation and an escalation that could easily lead to someone saying, oh, well, let's just use a tactical nuclear weapon. Oh, we'll wind it down. It won't be serious because we'll wind it down so there'll be almost no, if you like, radioactive footprint. It'll be just like a conventional weapon. Yes, it'll be a nuke, but does that matter?

Yes, it does, because that's going to take us into something. All right. I don't want to get too deeply into American politics, but there's obviously a straight line that can be drawn through from the Republicans in the House and their initial stages of an impeachment inquiry and the United States' deep involvement in Ukraine. I mean, even though the Defense Department keeps giving mixed signals, it appears that they have spent nearly all or are close to spending nearly all the $113 billion that the previous Congress, when the House was controlled by the Democrats, gave

to President Biden, because now President Biden's asking for another $28 billion. If the Republicans get too deep into the impeachment inquiry, and it begins to persuade them that then-Vice President Biden was arguably corrupt with respect to Ukraine. They might not give him the 28 billion that he wants. And American aid could conceivably dry up. Does this make sense to you, Alistair? It makes perfect sense. And I would say, you know, it's already drying up in Europe, the aid. They've asked for, I think it's 89 billion more euros.

And the reaction from some European states was just, you know, forget it. We haven't got that sort of money to hand over. So I think that is coming. And Zelensky is in a terrible bind. He's caught. I put it between a rock and a hard place. The rock, which is actually the predominant one, is his hard right. The ultra-nationalists and the neo-fascists,

they're in alliance with some of the oligarchs. I mean, a predominant politically. The military, on the other hand, is also getting fed up, but fed up in a different way. The Ukrainian military is showing very clear signs that it is, you know, fed up with NATO's nuclear, NATO's military doctrines. Their military doctrines that force them to go pull out against the Russian defenses and lose 10,000 men a month in the process. And they just are fed up with us. So he's in a difficult corner.

And the hard right will not allow him to negotiate with Russia. They want the war to go on one way or another. If the troops throw down their arms, if General Zelensky says, we can't go another day, another minute, another inch, the hard right will expel, kill, do something, neutralize President Zelensky, and he knows that. Yeah, it could end up in near civil war or civil destruction. This is not a popular uprising because there's no popular parties allowed. But it could be that the military and the hard right face off against one another.

And Zelensky will be in the middle of that. And it's uncertain what that will mean and what will be the outcome of that. But it is, we are moving towards the crunch in Kiev. And it will be probably a period of high tension and great difficulty. What is your take on what Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, President Biden, to the extent that he gets involved in these conversations, are saying to each other and thinking now? They want us to believe that Ukraine is winning the war. This is one of our regulars on this program, former Marine Corps officer and State Department officer Matthew Ho,

has referred to this as the most propagandized war in the modern era, at least in the West. But what do you think they're really thinking? They're not blind. They must see what the rest of us see, these neocons who brought the West into this. Yeah, I think they understand that exactly. But we are in the process of now, there has to be a scapegoat, there has to be someone to blame. And the choices are obvious and only two. Either you blame Zelensky and his military high command and that they didn't do what NATO told them to do and that they were dividing their forces up too much, fighting too much across too

many fronts. Either you blame them or you try and turn it back onto Russia and to Putin and to demonize further Putin. And I think they're just trying to do that. It's not very convincing, but that's basically what they're trying to do, I think, is to try and set it up. Well, at the bottom, you know, this is all Putin's fault. He invaded. He caused this problem. It wasn't our fault at all that we are in this mess now. I don't know that it will hold up. Do we learn from history, Alistair, that with the passage of time the rationale for war changes? Yes, we do. Certainly I've learned it. I've learned it in the many ceasefires and things that I have had to negotiate.

Many of, you know, you come, someone comes from Washington or London and says, you know, why can't these people just understand that violence is not in their interest? And it's much better to negotiate, cut a deal, find a solution, get out of this. And they can't understand why that doesn't work. And the reason is because people have been changed by war. They've been changed by the loss of loved ones. They've been changed by the sheer hardship, attrition, and the stress of war. And for them, you know, this might make rational political sense,

but it doesn't make psychological sense. They want the other side to suffer. They want them to suffer as they have been suffering. And therefore, you know, the space for common ground, the space for negotiating becomes very narrow and also has to, and this is my experience from many of these negotiating ceasefires, you have to take into account the psychological. The mood changes completely. What was possible last March in Istanbul will no longer be possible today, because the mood in Russia, the mood in Ukraine, the mood in the West is different. Here's an interesting clip from an interview that my friend and former Fox colleague, Tucker Carlson, recently had with Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary. And it's to your point

about how Americans see freedom and the U.S. far differently than Russia sees Russia and Russian culture. The Russians are more concerned with maintaining the physical integrity of the country, and this is what motivates them. But Prime Minister Rubin says this more articulately than I'm summarizing it. Here he is with Tucker Carlson on Russian culture. To understand the Russians, it's a difficult thing. So when we speak about politics, I mean Westerners, what is the focus point of our conversation? The focus point is freedom. How to provide more and more freedom to the people. When you speak on politics in Russia, this is not the number one issue.

The number one issue is how to keep together the country. That's generated a different kind of culture and understanding of politics. That creates a kind of military approach, always on security, safety, buffer zone, geopolitical approaches. But we have to understand that we cannot beat them as we do just now. It's impossible. They will not kill their leader, they will never give it up, they will keep together the country and they will defend it. We finance more, they will invest more. If we send more technical equipments, they will produce more. So don't misunderstand the Russians. So they're not going to get sick of Putin and throw him out. Come on, it's a joke. Sounds pretty rational to me, Alistair. What are your thoughts?

I would even go further. I would say the big difference is that we think in terms of individualism. And Russia, not in the Chinese way, but in a Russian way, has a holistic approach that incorporates their culture and even their religion into an idea of, if you like, the common being, the common cause, the common sense. And so, yes, what he's saying, I think, is absolutely true. And I go further. It's not about rationality. It's not about sort of just we'll get more weapons.

It'll be more. They see it as something that Russia, Russia as an entity in itself, being Russian, requires us to think at all levels in a holistic way about how can Russia survive and how will Russia be strong enough to survive the challenges it faces. What is your gut instinct as a former British diplomat who's negotiated ceasefires tell you that Western leaders think? In Brussels, for example, do they embrace what, not publicly, of course, privately, what Prime Minister Orban just said? Are Western leaders privately talking among themselves about an off-ramp? Can you address those two areas, please? Yes, they are, but they don't know really how to talk about

it. I mean, one of the things that's quite striking, I've done also hostage negotiations at times. In hostage negotiations, and people come, governments have come to me and said, can you open a channel to such and such a state or something for prisoner exchange or to release an individual? And I say, opening a channel is easy, but what are you then going to say? Do you know what you're going to say? And the answer is mostly they don't know what to say. And I think it's the same now in Brussels and in the West. They don't have a clear idea what to say to Russia. And what they do think they might say just makes no sense. Are you going to seriously say to Russia that, look, we'd like to freeze it for a ceasefire,

and in the meantime, we're going to prepare Ukraine to join NATO. And in the meantime, we're going to build them up with more weapons and more money so that in four years time, we can start the war against you again. And that they're going to say, yes, they're not. It's outrageous. And they will not accept anything of a ceasefire so long as the predominant power in Kiev is the ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist groups. And they are still predominant together with their oligarchic supporters. Let me ask you about the flip side of this. Do the Ukrainians fear, whether it's because Joe Biden thinks this is best for his re-election or the money runs out or whatever the reason is that they, the Ukrainians, might be thrown under the bus by the West. Yes, that's precisely why there's so much turmoil at the moment and so much infighting

in Kiev because they fear this. Some fear that Zelenskyy has been duped by the West. They fear that it's coming soon, that they will be thrown and told to negotiate with Russia. And of course, they see that as going to be a disaster because Russia will not ask for certain measures. It will ask for capitulation, essentially. Either a voluntary capitulation, and if they won't agree to that, then they have the means and the power to enforce a capitulation, to bring the state to a standstill. Here again is the Tucker Carlson, a clip from the interview with Prime Minister Orban, and he said, it's almost exactly what you just said.

It's up to the United States to bring about peace. If the United States would like to have a peace, next morning there is a peace. Because it's obvious that the Ukrainians, the poor Ukrainians on their own, they are not competitive in this war. So if there is no money and there is no equipment from the West and especially from the United States, the war is over. The solution is in your hand. It's in the hand of your president. The present one or the future one.

But you will solve it. The United States can do it. Nobody else. It's not the solution for the Ukrainians. Of course, it's about Ukrainians. They cannot be neglected. They must be involved. But the real factor is not Ukraine. The real factor is intention of the United States.

If Joe Biden says we're turning up the spigot, we're going home, does NATO and the West follow? Yes, of course, it will follow. The moment the money is cut off, the moment the weapons stop flowing, it's over. It's over. Now, it won't be pretty. I mean, it's going to be messy because we'll still be, if you like, the hard right in Western Ukraine and Kiev, and Russia is going to have to find some solution to this. This is why I called it, if you like, Hotel California. You know, it's easy to get into these things and very difficult to check out of them. There's no way out. You can't run easily from these things, whether it's Russia, whether it's the United States or whether it is NATO. We get drawn into

this. There's no easy solution. But all I'm trying to say is the ideas they have that they can simply sort of go to Russia and say, you know, like Scholz and Macron say and say, look, we need a ceasefire. Let's have a ceasefire now. I mean, they just don't think through. Why is it? This is what I found with hostage negotiations. And you I used to say to these government and say, what are you going to say to them? They say, well, oh, you know, the hostage has a family. He's got children and things like that. And I said, forget it. You can't do this on humanistic terms because, you know, they've got umpteen stories that are just as terrible as your stories about your hostage.

No, you have to say, I have a mandate and I have a solution. Don't have that, forget it. Paul Jay So right before we came on here, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Ukrainians breached the first of the three defensive rings that Russia has created between itself, between Ukraine proper and eastern Ukraine now under Russian law, legally a part of Russia. I don't know if the report is true. It's based on statements by one Ukrainian soldier. It doesn't seem realistic, but we're trying to check it out. I'm looking at your face and you don't believe it either. No, it's not true. I mean, it's not true because of the particulars of Rabotino.

It's not the case. I mean, the village doesn't exist anymore. It has been ground down to ground. There's no shelter there. There's nothing you can take for, you know, to shelter troops or anything. So what happens is every so often the Ukrainians move a force towards it. They take the northern end of the village. The Russians stay in the southern end. There's a sort of middle ground which is neutral.

And then the Russians come and bomb them in the northern end. The air force come and they bring their artillery. They move back and we repeat the game. We wash, rinse and repeat it several times in this week. But the deputy defense minister keeps saying, I think because of the crisis in Kiev, these things are simply not true. She's also been saying that the Russians are all surrounded and completely encircled in Bakhmut at your mosque. And it's just nonsense. It's not true. And she also keeps saying this, that they've crossed the first defense line. They're not even at the first defense line. They're talking about the sort of crumple zone or the outer curtain before you reach, they are still kilometers away from the first real defense line. We're just talking about trenches there that are

designed to, you know, impede them. And they move. One day, you know, the Ukraine makes a little progress. The next day, Russia reverses it. There's no strategic gain at all. Alistair, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for your deep and profound analysis. It is so much appreciated. Thank you. Thanks very much. Of course. There you have it. More as we get it, as you know. We're marching closer and closer, up to about 193,000, to our goal of 200,000 subscribers. That's you, your friends, your colleagues, your relatives, your co-workers, your enemies, anybody you want to tell about how you can really learn what's going on with the wastage of American treasure and the wastage of American liberty, because at Judging Freedom, we're looking out for your liberty. Altyazı M.K.