Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/21/22 James Carden on the Need for Strategic Empathy

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

This week on Antiwar Radio, Scott talked with James Carden about an article he co-wrote recently with Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation. The article compares the current level of tension between the U.S. and Russia with the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis sixty years ago. They argue that two factors make today’s flare-up more dangerous: a lack of communication channels and an absence of empathy for the other side. Carden explains why we do not need to sympathize with the Russian invasion to recognize that there is room for diplomacy.  Discussed on the show: “How did we avoid a Cuban Missile ‘Armageddon’? Strategic empathy.” (Responsible Statecraft) American Committee for US-Russia Accord James Carden is the executive editor for the American Committee for US-Russia Accord and former adviser on Russia policy at the US State Department. He is a contributing writer at The Nation. 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. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. 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

Scott Horton comedy. That's right, I'm doing an event with Robbie the Fire Bernstein here in Austin on the 5th of November as part of Robbie's porch tour. It's kind of an audition, actually. I'm trying to get the job to replace Dave Smith as Rob's sidekick. So show up and pretend to laugh at my awesome, hilarious comedy jokes. Robbie and another dude are also doing stand-up. Then Robbie and I are going to do a live podcast about libertarian themes and Star Wars and things. That's November the 5th.

Go to thefireticks.com to find out all about it. For Pacifica Radio, October 23rd, 2022, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com and editor of the new book, Hotter than the sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. You can find my full interview archive,

more than, uh, was it, 5,700 of them now, almost 800, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube, which is censoring me right now, so you shouldn't, you should go to Rumble or BitShute or Odyssey or any other alternative to YouTube and look for the archive there as well. And follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton show. Okay. And now introduce.

sing. My old buddy James Cardin, he writes for the Nation magazine, and he runs this thing called Acura, the American Committee on U.S. Russian Accord. And here he has an article that he co-wrote with Katrina Van dewevel, the publisher of the Nation magazine at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. It's called How Did We Avoid a Cuban Missile Armageddon? Strategic Emposite. Hmm. Welcome back to the show. James, how are you doing, sir? Well, thank you very much, Scott. Strategic empathy. That sounds like treason. How dare you? I know the nerve of us to suggest something that is basically applying the golden rule to U.S. foreign policy.

It's an outrageously a subversive idea these days, I guess. Yeah. I remember when Ron Paul brought up Jesus and the Golden Rule at a Republican debate in 2012, and the whole crowd just booed him. Right. Right. I mean, this is an idea that it was Secretary of State John Hay, who served under Theodore Roosevelt. That was his guiding principle, the Monroe Doctrine and the Golden Rule. But we've come a long way in the past 120 years. And now these ideas are. basically not only frowned upon they are they put you kind of on a media blacklist and that's a sad state of affairs but it goes a long way to explaining where we are in the world yeah you know what so let's go back to where this interview started because i think we found one major important loophole in exactly what you're saying here now not when it comes to tv or anything like that but this article, for example, that you've written here,

is co-authored with the publisher of the Nation magazine. And the loophole there is that she was married to the late Stephen Cohen, who was the Russia expert who knew better than all of this BS. And so she does too, and she is BS-proof when it comes to all these narratives about Russia. And yet, she can't quite be kicked out of politics. light society. She's Katrina Bannon-Wavel for Christ's sake. So maybe they can like sort of kind of try to ignore her, but they haven't begun to try to demonize her yet. I don't believe I've seen a single hit piece on her so far. And so now we know that like, look, she's a good liberal. She's not

like a hard leftist, whatever this or that. She's, and I don't mean to say she's a centrist. She's, you know, but she's like on the line between liberal and progressive, right? And it's not a radical, and yet has a view here far outside of the current center-left liberal consensus when it comes to the war in Crane and America's role in it all. So in a way, and that's sort of why I introduced you that way so that people know that like, I don't know. I didn't say that you write for the world socialist website of the Trotskyoid weirdos. Like, this is the nation magazine. Man, that matters, doesn't it? Well. And no offense to the world's socialist guys because they are Truscite weirdos, but I do kind of respect them because they've done some good work in the past. So what the hell? You know, go ahead.

They have in fairness. No. So getting just quickly back to Katrina, the other reason that her voice carries such weight is that she in and of herself is a Russia expert. So it wasn't just her connection to, you know, being. Pardon me, because I didn't really realize that. I'm sorry. Well, please elaborate about that since I screwed that up so bad. Oh, you didn't. It's just, it's not that well-known because she's, you know, she's known as mainly through her connection to the nation, but she's a fluent Russian speaker.

She's been going over to Russia for 40 years. She has written and co-written books about Russia. So she, you know, in every respect is a, is a, is a, serious, you know, Russia expert in addition to her other, her other talents. So people, I think, you know, mistake her for simply being a talking head from the, you know, David Brinkley, George Stephanophila show, but she's much more than that. And it was a pleasure to write this article with her. Yeah. Well, I mean, and look, the reason I kind of frame it that way is because there is a real crisis going on right now. I mean, look at your headline here. You're insisting that,

hey fellow adult people say left of center at all don't you think we should look at this war like adults instead of emotional children and that's a pretty radical proposition right now so and especially on the liberal left which i think for a lot of reasons i'm not wrong to say is really the modern descendant of the new left from the vietnam war era the civil rights and anti-war left of the 1960s And yet somehow you've got to go usually pretty far to the left to find people who are good on this stuff, whereas the center left liberals are just marching us to Armageddon here. That's true. I think that, and I've written about this before, that the anti-war movement, the center of the anti-war movement, is now moved to the right. There is really no viable, serious anti-war movement on the left anymore. The progressives have signed on to this proxy war with Russia with great enthusiasm. So it's been a shock and disappointment to see the progressives in this country with, you know,

some notable exceptions, coat pink, obviously, and people like that. I just interviewed Medea Benjamin last week. by the way. She is great. Yeah, she's terrific. She does wonderful work. But outside of that, I mean, let's not kid ourselves. That is not a mainstream group that has very limited appeal in this country. And all of the leading progressives, including Bernie Sanders and his chief foreign policy advisor, Matt Duss, are all for this war. And the other thing I just want to address, since you mentioned, Adults. When we were writing this piece, I came across a section of Robert Kennedy's memoir of the crisis. And he noted that in the excom, there were, in his opinion, some of the brightest, most qualified, experienced men in the United States. And he said that if any of a half dozen of them had been president, we would have been embroiled in a catastrophic civilization ending war. And that was something that alarmed me when I was reading through the minutes of the

excom in preparation for the article. You had people who were extremely, extremely experienced, bright, credentialed, and fast forward to today and look at the cast of characters that Biden has surrounded himself with. And it's really quite alarming to think that the people calling the shots are people who have continually made catastrophic judgments over the course of their careers. So, you know, there's only one person in the administration who really knows anything about Russia. And it happens to be the CIA director. And that's about it. So, you know, there's no committee of wise men and or women surrounding Biden. So we are really, it's in Washington, it's the blind leading the blind.

And it's a really terrifying prospect to think that the future of our country and perhaps even given the stakes, the world, is in the hands of Tony Blinken. Yeah, well, absolutely right there. Now, I want to get back to that in just one sense. second, but I want to go back to the first part of your analogy and your metaphor and all that for people listening here on the radio in L.A. on Sunday morning, a lot of whom, you know, whatever school they went to, never really learned about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Maybe they saw the movie with, oh, what's his name? Thirteen days. Yeah, Kossner. But remind us about that because I think there are quite a few anomalies in that story that do show

that we were, as I guess as the widely agreed upon, narrative of those two weeks there, was that that's the absolute brink of thermonuclear war, meaning you don't get closer to that without them all actually going off and us all dying. That was essentially

as high as those tensions can get, which goes to show. And I think, as you were saying there, you're quoting, was it Bobby Kennedy, saying if it had been any number of these other very distinguished gentleman around the table instead of his brother, at the head of the table, it would have been war.

Absolutely. From the very start of the crisis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the majority of the ex-com, and just, sorry, I keep saying that, thinking that everyone knows what that is. So that was the Executive Committee of the National Security. Well, in fact, you can go back to, it's 1962. The Soviets are stationing missiles in Cuba, mid-range missiles that can reach D.C. And so JFK goes on TV and says, oh, no, you don't. And this means war if you insist, I demand you take those out now.

And that was the confrontation. Right. And so the choice is then, you know, being presented to the president by the hard-lung military and civilian advisors were attack Cuba, take out the missile installations, invade Cuba. And they settled on a quarantine. So he made the demand that they would have to dismantle the sites. And then they quarantined the island. And that bought time for them to negotiate. But there were some extremely dangerous moments where the pressure on the president to launch a military strike was

extremely heavy. The day before the crisis ended on the 27th of October, the Soviets shot down an American U-2 reconnaissance plane over Cuba, killing the pilot. So after that happened, the vast majority of the people advising Kennedy were, you know, braying for retaliatory strike. And the president held out. The president was able, I think, to hold out because he and Khrushchev over the past year or so had kind of built up a rapport through the exchange of letters. And so they addressed each other in very frank terms. And there was a kind of trust built up there. We don't have anything like that today. So there was at least an open, in frank channel of communication between the two sides, and that helped to diffuse crisis.

And both leaders were able to, as Katrina and I suggest, they were able to empathize with the position of the other. And that is borne out in all of the historical documents. So the situation that we're in today, in some ways is more dangerous because we simply don't have that kind of robust channel of communication between the United States and Russia, and the level of distrust is absolutely through the roof right now. All right, y'all. Well, now I have to stop for a second to raise some money for KPFK. Well, running a radio station is expensive.

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Get tickets now. All right, it's Anti-War Radio. I'm talking with James Card, and he runs the American Committee for U.S. Russia Accord, and you should sign up for their email list. It's great articles every single day to inform your perspective on this entire crisis. And now I want to go back to what you said about how Jake Sullivan

ain't no Bobby Kennedy. And for what it's worth, I mean, I don't know if Bobby Kennedy was even Bobby Kennedy, but these guys sure don't have that much depth. And this is just a short clip. I don't want to try anyone's patience here. But this is from the obviously Russian intercepted clip of Victoria Newland, Robert Kagan's wife, and Under Secretary of State for European Affairs under Obama, on the phone with Jeffrey Pyatt, the ambassador to Ukraine. and this is where the famous F-the-EU phone call, the EU, meaning Germany's taken too long to do the coup. They're trying to negotiate, and we want a coup now.

So F-the-E-U, we'll just go ahead and do it our way, is the narrative here. Listen to it yourself. They took down the official version, but there are more on YouTube and wherever. But this is the all-important clip that I want you to hear very quickly here. So on that piece, Jeff, when I wrote the note, Sullivan's come back to me, VFR, saying, you need Biden, and I said probably tomorrow for an add-a-boy and get the

deeds to stick. So Biden's willing. Okay, great. Thanks. Okay, so this is Victoria Newland telling the ambassador to Ukraine that I just was speaking with Jake Sullivan, and he told me I'm going to need Biden to do it.

So I said right on, that's what we'll do. And we'll get him to do a conference call with the participants, essentially the people who they're planning to take over the government is who they're discussing there, and to give them the add-a-boy that they need, in other words, the confidence booster that America has their back here, speaking as the vice president of the United States,

and to make the deets stick, the details, to essentially let them know that that's what it's going to take to get everybody in line to get the thing accomplished. We're going to need Biden himself to get on the phone with them. That's the advice we got from Jake Sullivan. so that's what we're going to do and then he says okay great yeah so that's america plotting the overthrow of the government of ukraine in 2014 and by america i mean our current undersecretary of whatever they call her running you know having a lot to do with this policy on ukraine i guess

sitting in the state department of the national security council james i hope you can help me he's she's at number three at state she's under secretary and then our our president who was then the vice president who, as they say, held the brief on Ukraine. And his then national security advisor, former Hillary Clinton right-hand man, Jake Sullivan, remember, AQ is on our side in Syria. He, he, he, that guy. After Hillary left the State Department, he went to work for Joe Biden as his national security advisor, which is what he is right now for President Joe Biden, National Security Advisor. So these exact people, when you say, yeah, they've made bad decisions, they're the ones

who started this war eight years ago. And now all they can do is pretend that they didn't and that this is everybody else's fault but theirs. And they're the angels fighting against the forces of darkness. And ain't that convenient for them. And isn't that a real pain in the neck for us? That this is who we have stuck as, you know, part of this small group. of people running this war?

Well, I'll give Newellyn credit, for one thing. She's consistent because this has been a through line in her career, regime change. You mean how she used to work for Dick Cheney in the Vice President's office in the W. Bush years? Did I telegraph that? Yes, that's exactly where I was going. She was Dick Cheney's national security advisor. She's Robert Kagan's wife, for God's sick. The guy that wrote with Bill Crystal toured a knee of.

Reaganite foreign policy. It's time to establish American global hegemony in 1996. Right. So she was, you know, for the invasion of Iraq. She was for the debathification program pursued by Bremer. All of these people have, I guess the term is failing up. And there's never been any consequences for any of the disastrous advice or any of the disastrous policies that they've that they've pursued over the past quarter century now. Yep. Seems to work very well for them. All right.

Right. And I'm, you know, and not least among those policies is, of course, the policy of NATO expansion that is really at the root of this crisis. All right. Now, I'm glad you said that. Again, it's anti-war radio, Scott Horton, talking with James Cardin. What you just said there, that's known as a Putin, talking point. And the people who call it that, they never address why it's a Putin talking point.

Maybe he relies on that a lot because it's verifiably true. And so therefore, it's an effective talking point. But you can never agree with David Koresh, even that the sky is blue. Don't you know he's the enemy? And so no matter what it is that he says, it must be disregarded. But you know what, James? I also am an American. like you. And yet I can admit that this is all Bill Clinton and W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden's fault. That doesn't affect my ego whatsoever. I'm not Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton's not me. And when he makes a bad decision, that's really, you know, tough luck for the people who suffer the blowback from his policies. But it doesn't stain the

Statue of Liberty or my ego to admit when he does something wrong, which he does all the time and still does. same for w bush for god's sake and baroque obama are you kidding me donald trump are we getting warmer these aren't good presidents joe biden who's been nothing but john mccain in the senate since 73 and we all hate these people for good reason so why should it be that if they do something wrong it has to hurt our feelings so bad to admit it that that it has to be equated with taking the position of the other side but then so i'm sorry i'm just whining you back up your statement please sir if you could that NATO expansion has anything to do with this other than a cheap excuse for aggression by the Russians?

Okay, sure. I mean, the one thing I just want to note, and, you know, that's right. So anything that any argument made against this war, any argument made against U.S. policy that led to this war, you're immediately smeared as echoing Russian propaganda. And there's no doubt about the fact that the Russians do use these things. as propaganda, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong. And Putin is a little bit like Trump in a way. He takes a kernel of truth, and then he'll blow it up out of all proportion for political gain. There's no doubt about that. But, you know, with regard to

NATO expansion, the Russians have been warning us and pleading with us for 30 years not to do this. They feel that we went back on our word given by Secretary of State Baker and President H.W. Bush, that NATO would not expand one inch east of Germany. And we've expanded it in successive waves to Russia's western border. And they feel that we've not only broken our word on that. NATO expansion also was accompanied by our tearing up of treaties that were signed. during the Cold War, designed to ensure trust and verification, Bush tore up the ABM treaty, Trump tore up the INF and Open Sky's treaties. And so, and then also we've, of course, put missile installations in Poland and Romania. And so all of this stuff is happening in their neighborhood. And it makes them, I think, for good reason, feel threatened. But we've never taken that seriously. Even in December of this past year, the Russians issued a draft treaty asking, I think, for fairly reasonable things, such as Ukrainian neutrality. And then with a guarantee, and this is

similar sort of to the deal that was made in Cuba, that they would not invade. But we rejected it out of hand. We didn't even say that, okay, well, let's sit down and talk about it. It was rejected out of hand. So, you know, these things have built up in their mind over the past 30 years. And people like, you mentioned at the top of the show, you mentioned Steve Cullen and my co-author Katrina and people like John Meersheimer and a lot of the guests that you've had on over the years and yourself included, you know, have been warning that eventually these policies are going to result in something very, very ugly. And that happened. But we've had, we've had, we've had many chances to head this thing off. But there's no will among the American elite, among American elites like

Newland, like Sullivan, like Blankin, to pursue what Katrina and I call strategic empathy. And this has led us to an extremely unfortunate and dangerous situation. And it's a real tragedy because all of this could have been avoided. All right. So in a few minutes we have left here, James, please tell us about ACERA, this American Committee for U.S. Russian Accord that you run here. Well, the first thing I want to say about it is that because of the name of it, it's important for me to say that as a group, we unequivocally,

condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine. My position on war and peace of that is that if you're anti-war, you have to be anti-war all around. And there was really no urgency or, you know, build up in Ukraine and on the side of the West for the Russians to do that. So I just wanted to make that very, very, very clear. We are not funded by foreigners or corporations. It is a 511C3 educational organization. And we hold Zoom panels and now, thankfully, a few panel discussions in person. And we are just an organization that promotes dialogue and diplomacy. And those two things have been sorely lacking in Washington. We are not reflexively anti-American or pro-Russian what we are. We are for peace. And we believe that we, that other states have,

interests that we should take seriously. And we think that there really needs to be a change in direction with regard to U.S. policy towards Russia, which doesn't mean giving them everything that they want. It just means making the first tentative steps towards listening and understanding. All right, you guys, that is James Carden. He's the director of the American Committee for U.S. Russia Accord. Thanks very much again for your time. great to talk to you. Thank you, Scott. All right, y'all, and that has been Anti-War Radio for this morning. Thanks very much for listening. I'm your host, Scott Horton.

I'm the editor of Anti-War.com. I've got 5,700 interviews for you at Scott Horton.org. I'm here every Sunday morning from 9 to 9.30 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. Thank you.