Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/19/23 Branko Marcetic: Cables Expose Washington’s NATO Expansion Lies

Episode Date: January 21, 2023

Scott talks with Branko Marcetic about some cables he recently dug up that show U.S. officials and western governments voicing concern about Russia’s reaction to NATO expansion going back to the 1990s. Marcetic’s work adds to the evidence that shatters the argument that anyone connecting NATO expansion to the February invasion is either an amplifier or victim of a Russian disinformation operation. Scott and Marcetic go over what he found and zoom out to examine the broader context. Discussed on the show: “Diplomatic Cables Show Russia Saw NATO Expansion as a Red Line” (ACURA) “Ignoring Gorbachev’s Warnings” (Current Affairs) “‘Now or Never’: The Immediate Origins of Putin’s Preventative War on Ukraine” (Journal of Military and Strategic Studies) Retired General Wesely Clark saying the US cannot let nuclear weapons deter its efforts Branko Marcetic is a writer for Jacobin Magazine, a fellow at In These Times, and host of the 1/200 podcast. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. Follow him on Twitter @BMarchetich. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. 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: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY 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 four you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show all right you guys introducing bronco march teach uh usually writing for jacobin this one is an exclusive for acura viewpoint that's the american committee on u.s russian affairs i guess

you know, James Cardin and all our friends over there. And man, this is such an awesome article and I'm kind of mad

at you, Bronco, because I got a couple 100 pages worth of notes that I'm working through and then at the end was do another dive

into the wiki leaks and see what else is in there. And you beat me to the punch. And so my 600 page book eventually is going to come

out and everyone's going to think that all I did is just plagiarize you and Ted Snyder. Because you do all this great work and I,

have to borrow some of it. This is groundbreaking stuff. This is great stuff. You went back to the WikiLeaks and said, well, yet means yet is fun, but let's find out what else is in there. And you found a ton more documents in the State Department cables of warnings from here, there, and everybody on every side about why America should not try to integrate Ukraine into the NATO alliance. So tell us the story, man. In fact, when did you even get started on this? What gave you the idea? I mean, I probably worked on this for months, partly because, you know, I have other work commitments that I have to do in this, just took a lot of research, but also just because

honestly, something strange has been happening with the Wikileaks website. I don't really understand why it's happening, but the pages were constantly crashing. I doubt there's anything nefarious going on, but it made for a very painstaking thing. I will say good news for you. There's a wealth of material in the not just about NATO expansion, which of course is just one, you know, a policy that was a huge grievance of Russian leadership. And there's a whole heap of other stuff in there that kind of shows the in real time the deteriorating relationship between the U.S. and Russia. You know, I want to focus on NATO for this particular piece because, as I'm sure you know, and probably a lot of your listeners know,

there's been this kind of intellectual battle tug of war, let's say, over the causes of the war in Ukraine. And there's people like myself and a lot of other people who have kind of followed this stuff for a while who say, look, I mean, it's not the only cause, but NATO expansion is a big part of why we got to this war. And there's actually a substantial amount of evidence that shows that.

And there's a lot of people who are, I think, for more on the hawkish side of the spectrum, who have kind of said that basically the policy of NATO expansion is completely irrelevant, that's a mere pretext for the war, and really the real reason that's happening is because of these imperial ambitions of Vladimir Putin, who simply wants to sort of restore the old Soviet Union or the Russian Empire. And, you know, what I basically show in this through, you know, I can't overstate how many cables there were. This is just a tiny taste in this 4,000-word package that I've put here. I show that, you know, over just the years from the early 2000s to about 2010, 2011,

you have dozens of diplomatic cables where, you know, these are going to U.S. officials in the State Department. People are reading these. Where U.S. officials are being told by NATO allies like Germany, France, and Italy and Norway, by analysts and experts, both in the U.S. and in Russia, by liberal Russian figures and also by Kremlin officials themselves, you know, not just people like Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Affairs Minister, who's still in their post now, but, you know, lower down officials in the foreign ministry, officials in the foreign ministry, officials in the in the in the in the in the Russian parliament of course Putin himself too all of them are saying if the US continues to to push for NATO expansion which which

you know was a very inflammatory thing even in the 90s under under the pro western president like Yeltsin if they keep pushing for it and if they particularly push for it into Georgia and and worst of all Ukraine it will lead to a variety of terrible outcomes that we've basically seen over the last nine years, and that includes an inflammation of Russian nationalism and militarism, a less cooperative Russia, instability and even civil conflict in Ukraine itself, and finally, you know, some sort of drastic military step that Russia will take to sort of enforce this red line if it continues to be ignored. And unfortunately, as we've seen, right up until the invasion, the Biden administration continued to push for this policy,

despite these copious warnings. And this is the reality that we're living in now. Yeah. You know, in my last book, Zalmei Khalil Zad comes up over and over and over again, from recommending the Ayatollah in 79 all the way through the peace deal with the Taliban at the end. And the Zalmei Khalilzad of this book is Fiona Hill. She just pops up over. over and over and over again throughout. And I like the way you mentioned her at the beginning here that she says that anyone who tries, especially any American who tries to explain

this side of the story at all, is the victim of a Russian information war and psychological operation, which, oh, oh, boy, they got you, a Bronco there, that's pretty much not falsifiable. And you're screwed, except that Fiona Hill gave this same advice.

Over and over and over again. There's even a New York Times weekend magazine profile of her where it begins with her telling W. Bush, you better not do this before Bucharest. And Dick Cheney chewing her out and George Bush essentially, oh, it's funny. The anecdote is she says, listen, the Russians objections, XYZ, and that's why the Germans and the French don't want to do it.

And then Junior changes the subject to the Germans and the French and goes, well I like a good diplomatic challenge I'll just figure it out and in other words just dismissing the concerns about the Russians point of view in it at all and she's done this I mean I got her over and over again she goes oh yeah no I tried to warn him and the CIA tried to warn him too

we all tried to warn them that's her in 2008 and ever since telling the story of 2008 but now if you quote her telling her own story you're the victim of a Russian sciop so what does that mean she's FSB well exactly I mean that one of the

the things, this is a really great quote that the crystal ball of breaking points. She covered this as well earlier this week. And what she said was, you know, basically this whole war and the discourse around it has been like one massive experiment in gas lighting, you know, in a sense that we are being told that when we look at the very copiously documented record about this, where it has been U.S. officials and former U.S. officials, former politicians, former diplomats, experts, so on and so forth, who have been warning since the beginning, since before this policy was even, you know, enacted in 997, that we would end up in the situation that we're in now. We're being told that we're, you know, crazy or, yeah, as you say, you know, Kremlin agents

for pointing out what has been said in the mainstream press and mainstream discourse for decades. And I think one of the important takeaways of this piece that I've written that I think people should consider is that I just don't think it's credible if it ever was. But with this list of just copious warnings, it is not credible remotely to say anymore that this is just mere 11th hour criminal propaganda. They just made this up suddenly just as the invasion started. And the only reason that people think this is because it's what the Russian. want them to think. The reality is that it's U.S. officials and it's NATO allies and its people opposed to Putin, you know, liberal Russian officials who have been saying this stuff for years. And, you know, even Gorbachev, he doesn't pop up in this piece, but I wrote a piece for current

affairs after Gorbachev died. And, you know, he made the exact same warnings for, for, well, you know, when NATO expansion was beginning. And then throughout, he was saying that this is a bad policy, you're going to humiliate Russia, and that's going to lead to, you know, a worse domestic situation in Russia, a worse domestic climate, and it's ultimately going to lead to conflict between the two. So, you know, for me, I mean, maybe we can talk about this a little more, but for me, another takeaway here is what does this mean, what relatives have for U.S. policy right now towards Taiwan and China, where I think we are kind of, we're doing the same thing that that U.S. officials have been doing with Russia and Ukraine with possibly the same disastrous consequences.

Yep. Totally looks like it. And yeah, it's funny. You know, it's still the minority report somehow in America that, no, our government are the bad guys. Even though you and I know it, you know, from the sheriff's department to the national police, the IRS and the ATF and the FBI and the CIA and the Federal Reserve system. that bails out all the bankers and prints all the money and all the every bit of our government is the worst part of our society in every way somehow they deserve the benefit of the doubt

when it comes to their policy in eastern Europe even after 20 years of completely destroying the Middle East and killing two million people and having absolutely nothing to show for it whatsoever but somehow still they're on the side of the angels or they just wouldn't be doing it and i'm not sure if that really is what the american people believe anymore but it It's certainly still the dominant narrative on TV, and that's what seems to rain, you know, as you're talking about the atmosphere here, oh, these are Putin talking points and all that. Still, it is. Bill Crystal's view is dominant in American political culture somehow, and yet, as you, you know, lay out here, it's all their own words indicting them, if only there was anything like an open discussion, you know? Yeah. And I mean, that has to take place. We have to be able to talk about these things and debate these things and not, you know, have debate shut down with this kind of, you know, hacky and frankly disgraceful accusatory language, you know, where we, where everything that's inconvenient gets, you know, accused of being propaganda or, you know, having some sort of treasonous motive. That is a tactic to shut down debate. And, you know, this, happened after September 11, and what happened was that for years, and even now, still,

the United States pursued the exact policies that helped contribute to that crime that was done against the American people, and that fed more anti-American resentment, more anti-American terrorism. We were basically throwing fuel into the fire, and it was because for a long time we were not able to have this, this, you know, rational debate and discussion about what was it that had driven those people to fly those planes into those buildings and to do everything else that terrorists had done over the years. And, you know, to some extent, I mean, what happened was horrific, the result of that, you know, Iraq War, Afghanistan, drone bombings, but it at least did not come with the threat

of nuclear annihilation and the unraveling of civilization because, of course, terrorists are vastly overpowered by the United States military. In this case, we don't have the, you know, let's say, luxury of the time to sort of wait until domestic political climates in the West change enough that we can, you know, feel safe to talk about this stuff. I think we really have to treat this urgently and talk about it now. Because as we speak, you know, I know that Biden has said that he wants to keep the US side of World War III, and I have no doubt that's his intention. But as we all know through history, the intentions of leaders don't necessarily matter once you end up in a spiral of escalation.

That's kind of what the U.S. and Russia are now. You know, there was just a report recently that the Biden administration is actually possibly considering letting Ukraine strike Crimea. which a lot of experts have talked about could be a trigger for some sort of nuclear escalation. So to me, I think it's really important that, you know, people who have the, you know, courage of their convictions, who have a moral conscience, who are worried about what these escalating U.S.-Russian tensions could mean for the entire world, let alone, you know, people in the United States, that they, you know, take this stuff seriously and talk to people about, you know, what is it?

what could have been done differently over these decades in U.S. policy to take us on a different path than the one that we ended up on. And if we don't talk about it, well, you know, I really don't want to think about what might happen. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book All the War Lies by me for free. Just sign up the email list at the bottom

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Well, you know, and they say, well, geez, you know, whatever attacks have gone on, they haven't escalated, they haven't nuked us so far. This is the new thinking approach, they say in the newspapers that, geez, maybe we could push our luck. But when they blew up the Kirch Bridge, that was when the Russians started all their cruise missile attacks on civilian infrastructure in the country, got their revenge by knocking out the power in the wintertime. But that's just Ukrainians, you know, they're the ones in the firing line. They're the ones who are going to have to suffer the consequences. Not us in the West, so it doesn't matter, right? I mean, that seems to be exactly the point of view they're expressing. Yeah.

And look, on China, especially for people who lean right, like I get it, it's a big red flag. all that stuff. But even if you believe their threat to Taiwan, I guess they could lay siege to Taiwan and retake it somehow, you know, at least coercively kind of force them to surrender or some kind of horrible thing. But so what? Taiwan's been part of China since the 1600s. That's not the same thing as saying, oh, they're coming to Japan next in South Korea and then California and what are we ever going to do. They're no threat to us at all. And, you know, I'm glad that you brought it up as kind of a parallel to the Ukraine situation, because that's exactly what it is. It's America arming them up and saying, now let's you and him fight.

And we may or may not, you know, engage and participate in the war to whatever degree. Although the problem is, you know, the Chinese, they have to bite off a lot more to chew there when it comes to Taiwan because it's an island, which I guess it makes it easier because they could just kind of lay siege to the thing. But it would make it a hell of a lot harder to invade compared to rolling right into Ukraine. But it's also true that all the U.S. Navy war games say that our ships end up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and we lose that war because it's 7,000 miles, you know,

east or west or whichever direction from here, whichever you go, it's about 7,000 miles, I don't know, 8, 9. And so, you know, there's just no way we can win a war out there. It's just, it's insane to think that we would pick that fight. but it's almost like you know we would be better off if the skull and bones ran everything or something because then someone's in charge it seems like

no one's in charge it's just you have the arms manufacturers and the different departments in the agencies who have their own bread that needs buttering and then the whole thing is just as my friend Adam says it's the flea wagon the dog but you know the dog's asleep nobody even driving at all

and they could they could get us in a nuclear war in in Ukraine with Russia or over Taiwan with China this week at the way that they're going, do you know? Yeah, well, I mean, I would stress to people because, you know, unfortunately in the kind of bifurcated political landscape of the United States, you have, you know, on the liberal side, I think people have less appetite to go to war with China, but they have taken on this really hawkish, almost neo-Cold War mindset that they want to be super aggressive towards Russia. And then on the right, on the Republican side, among conservatives, it's the opposite.

You know, the people have less appetite to go to war with Russia. But they want to basically have the exact policies that are crying when it comes to Russia and Ukraine aimed at China and Taiwan. And the key thing here is both of those conflicts, seeking conflicts with both those powers, are going to be equally destructive. And with China possibly even more, I mean, we've seen the economic devastation globally that has resulted from, you know, the war with Russia, you know, which at the time at first people said, oh, you know, Russia is just a, it's just a gas station, basically.

It's one big gas station. It doesn't matter to the global economy. Well, it turns out when the economy runs on a fuel like gasoline, actually it does matter quite a bit. And it does matter when the country is a, you know, a commodities giant that exports a whole bunch of really important goods. Now, China's the largest trading partner of the most countries in the world. What kind of impact do we think that a war with a country of that size, of that economic

importance, eclipsing even Russia is going to have, and also a nuclear power country? You know, one thing I would stress to people who genuinely, you know, their top priority is the safety of Ukrainians and Taiwanese people. And I think there are a lot of genuine people who really, that is. That is their main concern in this whole thing. And that's totally fair. But if that is your concern, the thing that you should be aiming for is a policy, pushing for a policy, that is going to make war against those countries least likely. Unfortunately, it's too late for Ukraine, but it's not too late for Taiwan.

And the factor is similar to Ukraine. If the U.S. continues to kind of water down the one-china policy or sort of hedge its commitment to that policy, if it continues to pile weapons in there, it could lead the Chinese to similar to Russia to decide to invade. You know, Lyle Goldstein, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, I spoke to him last year sometime, and, you know, he made the point. that, you know, the Chinese are looking at what's happening, what the U.S. is doing, and they're saying, you know, and they're making a calculation in their head, you know, is it worth invading now, maybe, when the cost of a war could be far less, then waiting until, you know, Taiwan is much more militarized. And then the U.S. finally, you know, says, we're completely giving up on the one-China policy and we're supporting Taiwanese independence, at which point of war could be

way, way, way more devastating. You know, I'm not saying that they've made a decision on that, but that is the kind of calculus that they are going through. And we do not want to influence their calculus in a way that leads them to do something rash and destructive as Putin did in Ukraine. Just one more thing, you know, if people aren't convinced by that, there is actually a piece at the General of Military and Strategic Studies by Jeffrey Roberts. He's a professor of history at the University of College of Cork.

And the peace is called Now and Never. It's about the decision-making to go to war in Ukraine. And he, I think, very convincingly, lays out based on public statements and what we know that basically Putin's reasoning was, and this is not, you don't have to agree with this reasoning, but this was his thinking was it's better to go to war now again and stop Ukraine from being, you know, added into NATO and becoming more militarized and more interoperable with NATO than to do it later. when we're going to suffer really, really terrible, you know, possibly defeat, but certainly, you know, a military course for doing that. Again, you don't have to agree with this reasoning, but that is the calculus that he was using, and I suspect there's a similar calculus going on

with Chinese leadership regarding Taiwan. Yep. Well, you know, Michelle Flournoy says that, Oh, you know, from West Executive Advisors, author of the Great Failed Surge of Afghanistan, she says, listen, if the Chinese can sink all our boats, we just need to build more B-1 bombers. And that wasn't a question. I'm sorry. And who, well, no, and who's, who's in those boats? I mean, the idea, oh, it's just, it's just a few boats. I mean, they're, there are human beings in there. Oh, thousands of them, yeah. People operate, operating those boats. Oh, no, she's saying that's why we'll just keep them safe at.

Pearl Harbor and and we'll just fly our bombers out there and just sink their Navy that way. We'll have the people in the planes die instead. Right. Yeah. Well, and look, the Chinese only have like 300 H-bombs. And we have way

more than that. And by the way, as long as we're, I'm not interviewing you about the documents that you uncovered here, I saw a clip this morning, a guy tweeted to Dave DeCamp this clip, Wesley Clark from, I guess, last spring, saying, we can't be deterred by nuclear weapons.

That's letting the terrorists win, essentially, you know? And he says, he says, we can't allow ourselves to be self-detured. But we're not talking about being self-deturred. We're talking about being deterred by them. But then he says, but don't worry, we have a nuclear deterrent. So they're not going to do anything to us. Well, but you just explain why their deterrent doesn't work on you. And that's Wesley Clark, the guy that almost got us in World War III.

in 1999 when he ordered the Brits to take the Pristina airport and they said no. I mean, I think people need to think about how extreme this is, you know, compared to the Cold War, we think of the Cold War as this uniquely dangerous period where the superpowers were on the edge, on the precipice of nuclear annihilation, you know, constantly. And in reality, I mean, certainly the Cuban Missile Crisis, that happened. But after that, there was a lot of effort made, you know, you might say to self-deter from both nations, to avoid this kind of thing from happening again. There was a lot of care taken to avoid situations that could lead to both countries, you know, ending up in a spiral of escalation. And now we completely – those kinds of policies, that kind of approach is being smeared or dismissed as, yeah,

appeasement or weakness and so on and so forth, it's much worse than what was going on during a Cold War, paradoxically. You know, I mean, Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower, who I don't think anyone other than the John Birch Society would accuse of being some sort of communist sympathizer or being friendly to the Soviet Union, when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, a terrible thing, no doubt, there was a lot of pressure for him to do something. You know, because there was a lot of killing going on. There was a lot of repression.

You know, there was an independence movement that was crushed. But he, I think, made the terrible but wise decision ultimately to keep the United States up because he understood that if the U.S. got involved, even to the point of supplying arms, there was a chance that things could just ratchet up and get out of control and you could end up in World War III, if not something, you know, much more destructive than that. I think generally we think of Eisenhower as, you know, was he perfect? No, but, you know, a guy with fairly good head and his shoulders. Now we consider his decision making then, you know, some sort of treachery or weakness.

And this was a guy who led, you know, the Allies in World War II. So that's how crazy things have gotten. Yeah, exactly. And by the way, in defense of the birchers, they figured out that actually the communists, like Eisenhower were agents of the capitalist conspiracy all along so got to give them credit for that

but listen I'm sorry we're out of time because I really do want to ask you about all these things but I guess everyone's just going to have to go read it yeah check it out on Akura on USRussiaacord.com and by the way US Russia Accord is a great resource in general for a lot of stuff about this war

and just general US relations I think people should really make it one of the regular raids if they're interested in the stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And they got a great email list. They'll keep you up to date every morning, too. And that's our friend James Cardin and all those guys over there. So listen, this is such great work. And I hope you don't mind that all your footnotes are going. I already have a giant block quote of you with all of your links made into footnotes in the book already from working late last night. And I'm going to be borrowing a few more of these. But great work as always, dude. I appreciate.

No, please, spread the knowledge as much as possible. That's the point of that piece. I think the deal is if I plagiarize a lot of different people, then it's just research. You know what I mean? I think that's how it works. Yeah, I think that'll hold up in a quarter of law. All right. Don't take it personal when I borrow so much of your work there.

But I give you credit. I don't just steal. I cite. Thank you, Bronco. Really appreciate you, bud. Yeah, I appreciate that. Thanks. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.

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