Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/14/22 Ted Galen Carpenter on the Danger of America’s Involvement in Ukraine

Episode Date: October 16, 2022

Scott interviews author and Cato Institute senior fellow Ted Galen Carpenter about the dangerous situation in Ukraine. Carpenter has been paying close attention to the social psychology behind America’s response to Russia’s invasion. He talks with Scott about how dishonest journalism, partisanship and neo-McCarthyism have poisoned people’s ability to see the war for what it is and have made many Americans completely dismissive of the danger posed by war with Russia. Carpenter argues that broad outspoken opposition to American involvement in the war is vital.  Discussed on the show: “The Global South’s Revolt against Biden’s Russia Policy” (Antiwar.com) “The NATO Vs. Russia Proxy War In Ukraine Could Become A Real War” (19fortyfive) Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Carpenter has written 10 books including America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course over Taiwan and most recently NATO: Dangerous Dinosaur. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative Magazine and the National Interest. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, 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 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got the great ted galen carpenter and of course he writes for us at antiwar dot com his latest there is called the global south revolt against biden's russia policy and he's got

this new one at 1945.com. The NATO versus Russia proxy war in Ukraine could become a real war. And I want you to know he's got a brand new book coming out. Unreliable watchdog, the news media and U.S. foreign policy.

Welcome back to the show, Ted. How are you, sir? Well, thank you very much, Scott. Great to be back. Great to have you here. So this proxy war the people look at a map because see harkeve is just 300 miles due south of moscow we are right on russia's border we had a proxy war with the russians in vietnam another one in afghanistan but in those cases you had a china and a kazakhstan as giant buffers between mother russia and the battlefield here we're just right on their doorstep and yet the consensus in dc on tv among all the guys good center left liberals on Reddit is that we should be absolutely doing our worst right now. And what's the hold up? We should be pouring more arms in. We should be doing everything we can

to destroy the Russian military and rub Vladimir Putin's nose in his humiliating defeat. And so what's with all this, you know, hesitancy on your part to follow through and show the bad guys what for on behalf of the good. Ted, come on. One of the things that amazes me about this episode is how the criticism of the Biden administration's policy is almost entirely that the United States isn't doing enough, that is not willing to take greater risks on behalf of Ukraine. And I'm stunned at the cavalier attitude, the people in the political and foreign policy, establishments that just minimize the danger that this could escalate to a nuclear war between the United States and Russia. But Ukraine is a vital security interest to Russia. Moscow has made it clear on so many different occasions that they will not allow Ukraine to become a base of

operations for NATO, period, full stop. And yet, Our policy may just have ignored those warnings. We've proceeded. Now we're in a full-scale proxy war. And the level of assistance has reached the point that the Russians are saying that the United States and its NATO allies have become full-scale belligerents in this war. We're playing a game of nuclear chicken with Russia. And this has the potential to turn out very, very bad. Well, and look, I mean, that's everything, right? Because pouring all these weapons in the way that we have and having our CIA and special operations forces in there helping to coordinate the war on behalf of the Ukrainians means that whether we're co-belligerents or full-scale belligerents or this or that kind of belligerence, it's all just categories made up in the minds of whoever. So if Vladimir Putin says, I now declare you a full-scale belligerent just with a turn of semantics, he's changed.

changed our role from one thing into the other, which I know you and I would probably agree that we pretty much have, pretty much have been full-scale belligerence this whole time. But the fact that he says that now means everything, right? Does that mean that now American targets in Poland are up for grabs or, you know, a whole other set of target lists for American weapons being shipped into Ukraine are now, you know, on the Russians list. whereas before they were not, that kind of thing, right? Jargon can mean everything at a time like this.

It can, and it's a very hard to predict how that will turn out in terms of policy changes on either side. The United States is assuming a level of risk for the American people in supporting Ukraine in this fashion. That should be reserved only for the most vital American security. interest. Basically, unless the security or independence of this country is at state, one should never be incurring the kind of risks that the Biden administration is incurring in its support of Ukraine. It is just a folly. And as I said, I'm distressed at the cavalier attitude that the establishment types are taking about the level of risk that is involved in this venture. Well, I don't know. Mutually assured destruction means that they could never hit us

with a nuke because they know we'll hit them back. And so we can get away with whatever we want, short of use and a nuke on them first. Those are the rules. That's what the liberal Democrat told me when I was on Kennedy Show on Fox News the other day. Well, you make a very good point. Fortunately, wars have never occurred because of miscalculation by one side or the other. So we can be absolutely confident of this. I mean, again, people who are so dismissive of the dangers that we're incurring are utterly irresponsible. And we've seen a whole host of incredibly irresponsible proposals that, for example, if Russia uses tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, our dear friend Max Boob from the Council on Foreign Relations.

So we'll just destroy the Russian Black Sea fleet. We have another scholar who said, well, we can buy conventional weapon destroy the Russian military in Ukraine. We have that much power. I'm not sure what they think the Russians will be doing while all this is going on. But apparently the assumption is that the Russians will simply slink away, tail between their legs, deeply apologize for having offended the United States and NATO, and will never ever challenge the West on any issue ever again.

Well, if you believe that, someone wants to talk to you about a terrific deal on a used bridge. That's not going to happen. Russia will dig in its heels. It would very likely retaliate, and I'm not sure just what form that retaliation would take if the U.S. and its NATO allies use military force directly against Russia. But they're not going to crawl and slink away. And now we've seen the escalation of our objectives, at least implicitly, to getting rid of Vladimir Putin. forcible regime change in Russia, just as we pursued in places like Libya and Iraq. And we know how brilliantly those ventures turned out.

Well, this is 100 times more dangerous. And I don't think it would turn out any better. Yeah. You know, people keep saying that, you know, Vladimir Putin is like Hitler. And this is like World War II. And the lesson of World War II is that Churchill was right all along. And America and England should have ganged up. to preemptively invade Germany in 1933, 34, maybe, at the latest.

And how, you know, the lesson from that is we got to always stand up to the bully. And you know how bullies are, you punch them in the nose once they back down and run away. And, you know, pretty easy. Everybody on TV agrees. And that's what's going on here. Isn't Putin Hitler? That's one of the problems. That's one of the problems.

I mean, our news media, its role should be. as a watchdog alerting the American people to incompetence, to malfeasance and in some cases to outright crimes on the part of policymakers. And that role is even more important with respect to foreign policy than it is with respect to domestic policy. Getting foreign policy wrong can result in the deaths of millions and millions of people. That's worse than any blunder, mistake, or even outright criminal behavior on the domestic side. And yet, instead of playing that world, what we see the news media doing is serving as the handmaid, as the enabler of the national security state, as the chief propagandists for the national security state. And we're witnessing that process once again in Ukraine. as we did with respect to the Iraq War, with respect to the first Persian Gulf War, the

wars in the Balkans, and so on. It's become a consistent pattern. And it's an utter dereliction of duty. Yeah, got that right. But you know it is. It's all social psychology, right? That, you know, what will people think of me if I take this position or that one? In fact, I'm trying to remember the anecdote. Someone was telling me just the other day. Oh, it was Medea Ben. Benjamin was talking with some Democratic congressman. She's from Code Pink, of course, talking with some Democrats. And I'm sorry, I forget the exact phrase, but it was something like, you know, talks with Putin. How would that look for a congressman to come out and say that?

In other words, the question was not whether we should be talking to Putin. The question was, how would this look for this congressman? or this Congresswoman, I think it was actually to come out and say that, it would look bad for her and all the social psychology plays against that. What we're doing this week is we're being tough on Russia. And it's almost like, you know, characters on a TV show or something here. Or it's straight out of public choice theory, I guess, where, yeah, there are just individual people. And especially in that position of power, they care more about themselves than the national interests in that circumstance, because how can they affect the national interest if they lose their

power? So everything's focused on getting by from day to day in the political world. And if that means pushing us closer to the brink of thermonuclear Holocaust, well, then that's what makes sense to do. There are a massive career in centers. Within the political arena, within the academia, within the news media to spout the conventional wisdom that's prevalent at any given time. If you want to marginalize yourself, if you want to put your career in jeopardy, the fastest way to do that is to be an iconic class, to speak your mind and contradict the conventional wisdom. We've seen what has happened to critics who dared do that. You had prominent journalists

like Cheryl Atkinson, who used to be one of the lead correspondents at the CBS Evening News. The minute she started looking into the Operation Fast and Furious, the gun-running operation that the Obama administration had giving guns to the Mexican cartels and hoping to trace them. She embarrassed the administration. The administration spoke to her employer, and suddenly her presence faded and faded and faded on the CBS evening news. We've seen it with people like Glenn Greenwald, who now have to operate independently, because the main news media outlets won't touch him. This is the way a country goes down to destruction when bonehead policies cannot be questioned,

cannot be disputed. People have neither the courage nor the fortitude to take on that kind of problem and do so with honor. We have a lot of people who are just willing to go along with the prevailing flow, even though they may suspect this is a bad, bad idea. They're not willing to speak out against it and jeopardize their professional futures. Yeah, and all around the society, people have to be brave enough to speak up and tell the truth. And speaking of bravery, I want to get back to something you said there about someone with none. Joe Srincioni, who was echoing Max Boot and David Petraeus, as you cite in your article here, Ted, saying that if the Russians use a tactical nuke, we ought to destroy their conventional army in Ukraine and sink their Black Sea fleet.

Well, Joe Srincioni is the same guy who told me on the record, and it's in my book for now until the end of time, which could be soon. But anyway, my book, hotter than the sun, includes the transcript of Joe Srincioni telling me two days after the war, began how this is all Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden's fault for trying to expand NATO into Russia's sphere of influence, for threatening to bring Ukraine into NATO, and how that does not make it okay. But it does mean that the new Cold War is America's government's fault. And this is the context in which Vladimir Putin is reacting. And then this same guy Joe Serencioni, supposedly a nuclear expert and, as you say, supposedly a moderate, then turn around and attacked all of his betters at the Quincy Institute for preaching

peace on this issue. And due to social psychology, obviously, sucking up to the center left liberals in power at the Brookings Institution and all the places he runs around, he's now out hawking Petraeus and Max Boot on all the support we should be giving to Ukraine, this anti-nuclear weapons activist, now to fit in, throwing out everything that I can prove he knows about the cause of this war, and in order to push us toward a nuclear weapons conflict with Russia. What a legacy and a disgrace for Joe Serencioni forever for the rest of his life that he'll never be able to live down. And Joe's shift of views, very sad, very disheartening.

I don't know what his motives are. I don't presume to read his mind, but the result is very sad at the deep. And one of the toughest things, I think, for people who line up in red team or blue team, mentalities is when they have to criticize people in their own faction. All too often, they're not willing to do that. It's easier, it's relatively easy to attack people on the other side and the views that they're pushing. But when you have to begin to criticize previous allies, that's when it becomes tough

and that really separates the people who are truly committed to a more rational foreign policy committed to an anti-war agenda and those who are just sunshine patriots when it comes to that and are only willing to take that position when it's relatively easy when it's convenient this is one of those testing times

especially for the left, are you willing to really go toe to toe to against a Democratic administration and point out that its policies are deeply flawed and potentially catastrophic? Because that is the situation. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, the audiobook of my book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism is finally done. Yes, of course, read by me. It's available at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, and soon on Google Play and whatever other options there are out there.

It's my history of America's War on Terrorism from 1979 through today. Give it a listen and see if you agree. It's time to just come home. Enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. The audiobook. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable.

Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the Institute, and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along. Make a deal with Expanddesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead.

Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level. And it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom. Real history, real economics, real education. Right. And of course, conservatives are cursed with this thing, where they, well, they're the right. So they have to attack the left from the right in the worst way. which is Biden is weak, Biden is ineffectual, Biden is not doing enough,

when, of course, the narrative is obvious. Biden is senile. Biden is reckless. Biden is driving with his eyes closed and putting us all in danger. How hard is that to say? But instead it has to be, you know, the tough guy Republicans,

out tough guying the Democrats. And there are America First Republicans who have been very good on this, but the leadership, has absolutely not. Mitch McConnell and his men, of course, are always to the worst of the Democrats on foreign policy if they can find a way to be. And so, you know, the bipartisan consensus, such as it is, has us in a really tough spot here. Unfortunately, it is a problem that has occurred frequently since the United States

embraced being an empire after World War II, how many times have we seen partisanship when it would actually serve a good purpose to criticize a totally flawed, misguided foreign policy initiative, that that bipartisanship just stifles criticism the lead up to the Persian Gulf War. We saw that with this silly propaganda about Iraqi soldiers pulling babies from incubators in Kuwait. It was baloney, total baloney. But we had people in both political parties circulating that. The lead up to the Iraq war, much the same thing. How many people on either side of the political aisle criticized the very questionable.

assertions that Iraq had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Very few. And those who did were immediately smeared. The rise of neo-McCartheism, I think, has become as prevalent in the Democratic Party as in the Republican Party, maybe even more so. And again, that is an attempt to intimidate critics of the national security state, critics of disastrous foreign policy initiatives. We're seeing the worst consequences of that now. What's funny is if you just talk about it for a moment, you see how nonsensical it is, right?

To think that anyone in America is a partisan of David Koresh or Manuel Noriega or Saddam Hussein or Mo Marjor. Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, or Vladimir Putin. I mean, back during the Cold War days, there were certain sects, not very large, but there were some groups of people in America who were loyal to the Communist Soviet Union. But there's no one in America who's a Putinist.

I mean, I had to make up that word. I saw actually some hawk had to make up that word to apply it to people who, there are no one, there is no group in America people who call themselves at. There's no Russian-American. and bund, out pushing Russia's point of view here. This is the only people disputing the narrative here. People from Chomsky to Ted Carpenter to whoever you got, to the boys at anti-war.com

and all we're trying to push here, the ladies at Code Pink, the only thing we have in common here is trying to push the truth to save lives. No one here is a, there is no one. Think of someone says, oh, you support terrorists 20 years ago. against attacking Iraq, or you support terrorism. Think of how absolutely nonsensical that is, how impossible it seems that an adult would he even utter that. Nobody's on the side of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin. It's just that America is the world empire and America lies about everything. And America has killed more than two million people

in the last 20 years. And so maybe we need to stop. pretending like we're Superman, you know, Christopher Reeves version, Virgin version, Boy Scout, Superman, never tells a lie and never does a thing, but save a little kitten from a tree. That's actually not the real United States of America at all. And so people just got to be honest about that, you know? Shouldn't be hard. Self-reflection is very difficult for a lot people, unfortunately. It's very hard. I can say that as an American to admit that in many ways, the United States has become the evil empire, replacing the Soviet Union in that role, causing enormous disruption and destruction around the world. And I'm not certain whether the motive for that is,

idealism won a muck that the advocates of that approach don't understand how misguided it is, the disastrous consequences that are flowed from it, but they took a look at a place like Libya post-U.S. military action. That certainly should be a very sobering lesson that our ventures haven't worked very well at all. And you do have people within the national security state who are not idealists by any stretch of

the imagination. They know exactly what they're doing. They're utterly cynical. They worship power for power's sake. And every country has

a segment of the leadership elite that fits that description. But unfortunately, that faction has become increasingly influential in the United States. And there needs to be far more serious systemic opposition to that community and its values and its policies. All right. So to wrap up here, it's Ted Carpenter from the Cato Institute. The Washington Post buried the lead the other day. I'm sure you saw it at anti-war.com. About halfway through a post article, they say, oh, the Biden administration officials off the record

admit that they know that Ukraine can never win the war. Neither can Russia. But anyway, we're not pushing them to negotiate. We don't want to negotiate. The mantra is, we'll keep this up as long as it takes. As long as it takes for what? When they already admit, they know that Ukraine can't win the war. It's like, you know, saying we know that the war in Yemen will be indecisive, long, bloody, and indecisive. So we're naming it Operation Decisive Storm. And then here's seven and a half years later. So here they admit they know Ukraine can't win, but they're going to prolong the thing anyway. So your reaction to that. And then also, Ted, if you're my secretary of state, how do we resolve this thing? I sent, I put you on a plane to Geneva to work this out with Sergei Lavrov. What's the deal

look like here? First of all, unfortunately, I think the United States is perfectly willing to have the Ukraine war drag on indefinitely. The original model was the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan

from 1979 and 1989. To bleed the then-S.-Oviate Union caused enormous problem for Washington's superpower rival and use the Afghans as pawns in that effort. Here you get the distinct feeling that Washington is willing to fight Russia, bleed Russia, cause enormous difficulties for Russia, and are willing to do that to the last Ukraine. That is an immoral policy.

It is a disastrous policy for the people of Ukraine. And ultimately, it simply worsens already bad relations between the United States and Russia. We have a full-fledged new Cold War, and that was so unnecessary. If the U.S. had not pushed to expand NATO and make Ukraine a military pawn, this never would have happened. And we can't undo the blunders and terrible policies of the past. What we can do is facilitate negotiations toward a diplomatic settlement. The U.S. can't really act directly on this. We have no credibility with Russia, but there are third parties that can be encouraged to do that

and show a willingness to do it. And that effort should be encouraged, not as what the United States and Britain did in late March and early April, namely torpedo a potential diplomatic deal between Moscow and Key. We have to have exactly the opposite policy. No one's going to be happy about the ultimate diplomatic settlement here.

but we can get one that both sides can live with, and I do mean that in both senses of that term. It's going to spare thousands and thousands and thousands of lives if we get a settlement soon, as opposed to having this drag out year after year for multiple years. So now Putin has declared again was just a turn of phrase and a stroke of a pen that these four major oblasts

were provinces basically of eastern Ukraine are all now Russian territory and of course he said he'd defend them with nukes that's a hell of a position for him to back down from so at the table you say what keep Donetska-Lohansk but give back Suprosia and Kurson and they're not giving back Kurson and so in other words

like you're saying, boy, if they had signed this deal in April, it sure would have been a lot better. But, you know, Lindsay Breyerstein and all the good liberals, center-left liberals, remember, pretended that there was a genocide going on. That was the word. Everyone retweet, genocide, genocide, genocide, right as Boris Johnson was going to tell the Ukrainians, don't sign this deal. So now here we are. And I don't know if the Russians can hold on to that territory or not.

It seems like they probably can if they mobilize. for full-scale war, it seems like Putin's making a hell of a bet if he's declaring that's all sovereign territory now. He must be planning on flooding that zone with hundreds of thousands of infantry permanently, or else he's got to take that back. So, in other words, Secretary of State Carpenter, you've really got your work cut out for you here now that we're more than half a year into this horrible war. Putin's annexation decision, certainly very unhelpful. And we have to be candid with the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people, and this is the one thing the Biden administration is, absolutely not been willing to do.

And we have to tell Kyiv, we're not going to continue pouring weapons into your country. You need to make the best peace you can with Moscow. We're not going to keep this going on a multi-year war. that's not in your best interest. It's not in our best interest. The risk level is way too high. It's not in the best interest of anyone. Let's bring this war to an end. If the United States had given that advice back in February and March, Ukraine very likely could have had a decent deal, relinquishing Crimea and agreeing to stay out of NATO, and then perhaps an internationally supervised plebiscite in the Donbass region, for those to Oblast. I doubt if it can get that kind of good deal now. It'll be less beneficial to Ukraine than it would have been before.

it's still going to be better than continuing this war, the bloody loss of life on both sides, that benefits no one. All right, everybody, that's the great Ted Carpenter. He's got a new book coming out, Unreliable Watchdog, The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy. He's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and read his latest at 1945. The NATO versus Russia proxy war in Ukraine could become a. real war. Thanks very much for your time, Ted. Thanks for inviting me up. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.

APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.