Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/20/22 Clint Ehrlich on Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan

Episode Date: January 22, 2022

Scott is joined by Clint Ehrlich who recently went viral after his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show struck the nerve of a handful of foreign policy “experts.” So Scott invited him on the show to dive deeper into his arguments. They discuss why Ehrlich is nervous about the situation in Eastern Europe and how it came to this. He also gives his take on what happened in Kazakhstan. Discussed on the show: “A Stark Nuclear Warning” (New York Review of Books) “The US Must Prepare for War Against Russia Over Ukraine” (Defense One) Clint Ehrlich is a foreign-policy analyst, lawyer and former visiting researcher at MGIMO University. Follow him on Twitter @ClintEhrlich. 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; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. 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 show all right you guys introducing clint erlik most recently known for his twitter threads on ukraine and russia issues and kazakhstan for that matter here in the last few weeks but he is a computer scientist and a lawyer and a former visiting researcher at M-G-I-M-O-Uiversity

and you can find him on Twitter at Clint Ehrlich and it's E-H-R-L-I-C-H and in fact we'll start with this when I first looked you up on Twitter I spelled it wrong and the first thing I found was prop or not from years ago calling you a... a Russian agent, and which has been a real heavy theme going on this week, judging by your retweets and quote tweets there, of all these influential people accusing you essentially of being on a list of communists in the State Department or something like that.

You can see the quality of their research, given that they can't even spell my name right. Yeah, seriously. Which goes for me too, but then again, I got it right pretty quick and I spelled it right since then so that's good um but now so let's start with all the attacks they're all attacking you and they're saying that listen you explain something from russia's point of view instead of from only the american point of view on tv and that's an unforgivable sin but also you were in russia when you did so and so clearly you're putin's puppet acting as his agent all these things

so i'll just give you an opportunity to respond to all of that if you would like please Well, I appreciate that, Scott, and I'd like to note that the attacks actually increased yesterday. The Washington Post ran an article after my appearance on Tucker Carlson, where they condemned Tucker for having me on, and they included a false accusation that I had been paid by the Russian government while I was in Moscow. They said that I had worked at a think tank there, and then I complained, and they were forced actually to retract that portion of the story and to admit that that was not true.

The real irony is that while I was living in Russia, I was published in the Washington Post. And they knew that. They credited me. My bioline was a visiting researcher at M.GEMO University. And so it's really funny to even see how over the course of just five years or so, they've gone from being willing to publish my stuff to now portraying me as some sort of villain,

because while I was in Russia, I had the gall to write about foreign policy and Russia's perspective on America. And at the time, I thought that I was really providing a service because I was a visiting researcher at Engemo. For those who don't know, it's often called the Harvard of Russia. It's really more like a cross between Georgetown School of Foreign Service and West Point, because it is run by the Russian government, but it doesn't train people for their military. It trains their diplomats. And so I was a visiting researcher there. I had the opportunity to talk to people in their foreign ministry to try to find out what their perspective was. And I share that in an article in foreign policy, which is now being branded as pro Putin, just because I sounded the alarm that the Russians were very worried that Hillary Clinton was leading the U.S.

towards a war with Russia. And so it's amazing how if you sound the alarm, if you share the perspective of another nation, that's apparently enough to make you a foreign agent these days. Yeah, absolutely right, which is funny because that would mean we have a real scandal since our current head of the CIA was the guy who wrote the State Department document that Manning Leit and Assange published titled Nietz, Means Nietz, about their meeting with Sergei Lavrov, his meeting with Sergey Lavrov, where Lavrov told him that in very polite terms, we will do anything to keep Ukraine out of. NATO and you need to understand that and you need to tell the people back home how serious we are about that. And he's running the CIA right now. So I guess that makes him a mole and a traitor and you and him ought to be strung up together. I mean, what's really wild is they're making very concrete accusations saying that I'm being paid by the Russians today, that I'm on, you know, Vladimir Putin's payroll. And it's just, it's wild because

my money right now comes from the U.S. government. I'm actually paid by the National Science Foundation. They gave me a grant as a researcher to do my work. And so these people are really operating in almost a parallel universe. And they portray themselves as serious people, but they're buying into what are baseless conspiracy theories. There's literally no evidence to support this idea that I'm being funded by the Russians. But as soon as they see a dissenting view, they're willing to throw out those kinds of claims right so where are you from and what exactly was your purpose of going there to study uh so i'm from uh los angeles uh i i went over there uh to work on my my language skills uh and also because originally um i was interested in doing uh doctoral work on

the status six torpedo uh and i which was it's a a russian intercontinental uh nuclear torpedo was experimental at that time. And so I was interested in doing work basically in the field of arms control. I pivoted while I was there. I saw the Russians were maybe not thrilled about all the questions that I was asking about their torpedo. And so I realized maybe this wasn't the best thing to study. And so I ended up working on international securities law while I was there. And so really, I mean, this idea that I was an intelligence agent that just doesn't comport with reality. Then I came back to the states. I invented a new blockchain technology and decided that that was what I wanted to pursue. And so I came back to America and have been working on that. But then when I saw that events were

leading us into the direction of conflict with Russia and that people weren't speaking out, I felt an obligation to use my platform on Twitter to sound the alarm. And I never anticipated the scale of the response that would happen. I was in Moscow at the time when I posted that first threat about Kazakhstan. I did go and visit Russia's foreign ministry at M. Gimaud at the time just to talk to my contacts there to see what their views of the situation were. And people really were amazed, I guess, to have this outside, fresh perspective on the crisis in Kazakhstan. That thread went completely viral. Several subsequent threads have gone viral. And pretty quickly, I found myself on Tucker Carlson's show doing an interview with him. But it's really been a whirlwind.

Yeah. Well, you sure don't sound like you're concerned that the FBI counterintelligence division is hot on your tail here or anything like that. So I think you can stop wasting time with this kind of ridiculous red herring argument accusation. Well, I mean, I do want to point out it's a, It is a real problem for me, though. I mean, working in the private sector, when people make these kinds of accusations publicly about me, it certainly doesn't help my company. It doesn't help me to raise funds. It doesn't help me to advance my career.

And so that's the real irony. When they say, how much are you paid for making these media appearances? The answer is, this is really directly detrimental to my career. It would be much better for me to just sit down and shut up. and only work on computer science, I'm really putting myself on the line by doing this because I think that it matters and that people deserve to hear the truth.

All right. So now let's get to it. What exactly is your point here that you want the American people above all to understand about American-Russia's relationship right now? The main point that I want people to understand is that there's a non-trivial risk of nuclear war and that we're flirting with it,

that we're advancing closer and closer, and closer to conflict with a power that has more nuclear weapons than any other country in the world and that the reason for that is because of NATO expansion, decisions that we made in 2008 in declaring that Ukraine was going to be a member of NATO. And so now there's this inertia that's propelling us towards conflict because that was a horrible decision and we're not willing to back down over it. And so people can complain and say, well, morally, don't you think that Ukraine should have a right to join NATO, or don't you think that it's wrong for the Russians to engage in the conduct that they're engaging in? And my point is that this is really about American lives and about, frankly, the lives of everyone on Earth, because people have just trivialized the concept of nuclear war.

The Russians right now are talking about taking measures that would be truly reminiscent of a second Cuban missile crisis. They are threatening to potentially deploy strategic forces to Venezuela and Cuba. And what people don't realize, I'm sure that you realize this, but many of your listeners may not, is that the first Cuban missile crisis was not resolved effortlessly, smoothly in a way that was a credit to American foreign policy. Instead, we came as close as possible to destroying the entire world. During the first Cuban missile crisis, when we dropped depth charges on a Russian submarine, there was a vote on board that submarine. It was a two-to-one vote in favor of responding with a nuclear torpedo,

which would have set off likely a global nuclear war. And it was a fluke that Vassili Archipov was on board that submarine. He voted against using the nuclear torpedo. And so that one vote basically saved the world because they needed unanimous consent. But this time around, if we have a future conflict with Russia, we might not get so lucky. There might not be a hero like Vasili Archipov, who's available to save the day. And so I'm trying to sound the alarm and say, if you care about the fate of the world, that this kind of pointless aggression is something that you need to oppose. Now, one thing that you said to Tucker Carlson, I thought was important, was that NATO doesn't even want Ukraine.

anyway. Well, who exactly do you mean by that when you say NATO doesn't want them? Well, I mean, I think that broadly within the alliance, I don't know that there's anyone today that supports the extension of Ukraine into NATO. Not even America. Not even America. Not even America. I mean, that's, look, I didn't have an opportunity to correct Tucker. But in his lead in, he keeps saying that America, you know, is pushing Ukraine into NATO. And I think that that's really not. an accurate summation of the situation. I think it's better to say that America has dangled the prospect of NATO membership in front of Ukraine with no real intention, no real intention

of actually following through, because Ukraine does not come close to meeting the criteria for membership in NATO. But because we're not willing to admit that we were unsurious when we adopted the Budapest memorandum and said that they were going to join NATO, we've created this this crisis over a state that we don't even want in the alliance and now merkel's gone now and i don't know enough about politics in germany to know about the stance of the new guys i actually read a thing about their new green party leader is a real kind of Hillary clinton type center left talk but um i know that in the past the germans and the french both made it very clear that whatever the americans thought bush or obama or anybody else that they would use their veto power

to keep ukraine out of the alliance Well, and I would say that actually in 2008, it was Germany and France that opposed that declaration that Ukraine and Georgia were going to be added into NATO. They tried to warn the Bush administration, don't do that. It would be a strategic mistake, and it was the United States at that juncture. They really pushed strongly to include that language. And so now it seems like we're stuck with it, and we should have listened to them at the time. Yeah.

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take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com. com. Hey guys, Scott Horton here for Listen and Think Libertarian audiobooks. As you may know, the audio book of my new book, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism is finally out. It's co-produced by our longtime friends at Listen and Think Libertarian audiobooks. For many years now, Derek Sheriff over there at Listen and Think has offered lifetime subscriptions to anyone who donates $100 or more to the Scott Horton show at Scott Horton.org

slash donate or to the Libertarian Institute at Libertarian Institute.org slash donate. And they've got a bunch of great titles, including Inside Syria by the late great Reese Erlich. That's listen and think.com. You know, I hate all this diplomatic language. People are so constrained by some prepared words on paper where they say, well, you know, we would never let another country, Russia, or anybody else, close the door on NATO membership. for someone when it's the point obviously is just that well yeah but that's just your construct of the whole thing you don't have to phrase it that way you could be the one closing the door on it

or you could just and in fact this is one of the major points isn't it that on the December 30th phone call if i have it right i think i do Biden assured Putin that we're not going to bring Ukraine into NATO any time in the next 10 years anyway so he's obviously not going to put that in treaty form, but that's a pretty big promise and extends past even his second term in office if he wins one. And so, you know, I talked with Ray McGovern, the former director of the CIA's Soviet division back from, you know, in the 70s and 80s, I guess. And his thing was that Putin's demand that America promise to not bring Ukraine into NATO now officially or sign a treaty like that, that that was always the big ask.

What he really wanted was a handshake kind of acknowledgement that we're, as you said, that we're not bringing them in now any more than we were under Trump or under Obama. We're just, you know, they said that and they're not willing to walk it back, but they're also not willing to go forward with it. But that the real point of contention was the missiles. And they wanted assurances that we're not going to put the anti-missile missiles, as we put them in Poland, into Ukraine, because they have their launch from the MK41 missile launcher that can also launch Tomahawk cruise missiles. And so that seemed to be

the real point of contention. And Wendy Sherman had said, I forgot, I'm sorry, the exact quote, but she had indicated that actually, yeah, we made some real progress on missiles. And, you know, we'll see what happens next time we meet. And after all, it was just Trump that got us out of the intermediate nuclear forces treaty a couple of years ago. So I don't know if they'll get right back in the treaty, but they might. agree to start abiding by it anyway so to speak if you know what i mean seems like don't you think there's there's so many points to there's well i i think that the the the russians are playing their their cards very close to the vest and so i would i would hesitate to to speculate and say

that i can understand exactly what their endgame is i certainly think that it was there was a misperception in the united states that when the russians published their their drafts treaty with the U.S. and their draft agreement with NATO, that that was an ultimatum in the sense that they needed to get everything that was in those documents. That obviously was not the case. Lavrov himself said, this is not an ultimatum. We were open to negotiations. Now, he did then sort of subsequently issue an ultimatum about Ukraine and NATO, saying that Ukraine cannot ever, ever join NATO and calling that an absolute red line for Russia. Now, the question is, as you alluded to, well, Ukraine and NATO may be a red line,

but what is the extent of the guarantees that would be required in order to reassure the Russians that Ukraine isn't going to come into NATO? I would highlight one difficulty with the proposal that you've alluded to, the sort of handshake agreement. And part of it is that Ukraine is currently significantly improving its military capabilities. They're developing domestically missile systems that could target Russian cities. And so Russia is, I think, worried about its, it's the future and looking ahead towards potential crises. So maybe in 10 years when that promise expires, even if the promise, were maintained, then Russia would be facing a situation where Ukraine might join NATO.

And at that point, the Russian's ability to intervene and to stop that would be significantly degraded from what it is today. And so I think that we're right now in a really volatile, dangerous situation because the Russians feel like if they're going to use their military to stop this. And by the way, I'm not in favor of that war either. I'm like when I say that I'm anti-war, that includes being against the, the Russians intervening. I'm just dealing with the reality of the situation, but the reality of the situation is that the Russians may perceive there being a diminishing window of opportunity for them

to militarily intervene in Ukraine to carve out a buffer within the state. And so that's what I think makes this situation right now particularly dangerous. I would note, you mentioned the intermediate nuclear forces treaty, and I would note that our withdrawal from that really makes the present crisis with Russia even more dangerous, and that the accusations that we hurled at the Russians claiming that they were in violation of the treaty were largely spurious. The Russians' position was that they were following the direct text of that treaty, and they were. The text of the treaty categorizes missiles in accordance with their maximum range, and so the Russians

had missiles that exceeded the minimum range that was required. wired under the treaty in order to not qualify as intermediate range nuclear forces. Our position was well, even though they have a sufficient maximum range, they have the capability to be used at a shorter distance and that therefore that's a treaty violation and essentially arguing that the spirit was violated rather than the law. And look, the Russians certainly would have been amenable to further arms control negotiations where the text of the agreement was modified in that respect. But instead, we just accused them of being in breach when they weren't, and we threw away an agreement that really could have stabilized the current situation, at least with regard to those nuclear weapons.

Yeah. And you know, when I talked with Chos Freeman about this, he explained, and there are other sources, too, that the Russians were deploying these supposedly medium range treaty-busting missiles along their frontier with China. They weren't deploying them in Europe at all. And that the real reason the Americans want it out of the treaty is because they also want them for use against China, not for Russia and Europe, but they also want to put them in Japan and South Korea and whatever they can, you know, Guam or wherever. And so that was what it was all about, was both sides just want to pick on China. So they broke a treaty that was keeping medium-range nukes out of Europe. Exactly. No, and that's really a problem with a lot of these legacy arms control agreements is that as China rises and,

becomes a potential superpower, these bilateral agreements that we have that don't include China, then become harder to adhere to because there's this incentive for both sides to pivot their focus towards China. The problem is that we aren't done with direct confrontation between the U.S. and Russia. So when we throw away those agreements and we're looking towards the future in regards to China, it ignores the fact that today we would really benefit from having that kind of stability in our ongoing relations with Russia. All right. Now, so I was going to ask you, but I guess you already answered about, well, what's changed since back in 2015, the Dombas region voted to join Russia and asked very

politely to, and Putin told them yet. And so, and he could have simply just redrawn the border with a magic marker right then, I think. He had enough special operations guys on the ground there to pretty much enforce his will there. And he didn't do that. And so why do that now. America's been sending in a lot of javelin anti-tank missiles and light arms and trucks and things as far as I know training up and please comment

on this. Stay behind forces. There's the reports about the CIA and I guess special forces training them for a possible war. But you mentioned that Ukraine is working on their own medium-range missiles. Not that they have nukes, but that they're working

on their own medium-range missiles and that's not just anti-tank missiles, but tactical weapons for use across borders, that you think that's the window that's closing that's forcing the issue to Putin. I think that that's one of the windows. I think that our ongoing training of the Ukrainian military is also closing the window. That's not just being done with special forces in the CIA, although obviously for the state behind forces that you mentioned, those are the tip of the spear.

but there's also really widespread conventional training of the Ukrainian military. Our National Guard cycles through the combat training center there. And so they have like a every month, essentially like a new battalion that goes through and does joint combat exercises with us. And so there's this ongoing modernization effort of the Ukrainian military. That's one of the things that is maybe closing that window. Another factor is that Russia, due to our withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, essentially developed this new set of superweapons, so to speak, at the strategic level. And that includes the hypersonic zircon missile.

Everyone was so freaked out a couple months ago when China did its hypersonic missile test around the world. But that was only a glider reentry vehicle. and Russia actually has a maneuverable hypersonic cruise missile. And so for the first time since arguably certain periods of the Cold War, I would say that Russia has really leapfrogged the United States at the strategic level. It may actually have a fairly significant advantage in strategic nuclear weapons. And so that, frankly, may have bolstered Russia's confidence. It may now view itself as holding a much stronger hand in conflict with the United States

were in negotiations, not that it would necessarily use nuclear weapons, but that that threat is there, and so it may feel emboldened. Well, I'm back to the nuclear torpedo, because that was announced by Putin at the same time. I'm sorry, was it 2018 or 19 he gave the big speech and said, this is what you get W. Bush for pulling out of the ABM treaty? I believe that was 2018. And then it was the nuclear-powered cruise missile with essentially unlimited range, he claimed,

the hypersonic glider you mentioned, a new heavy Merv rocket that he said would go around the South Pole and hit Florida or Texas that way and then with enough warheads to kill every city in Texas in one shot there. And then the nuclear torpedo, which was going to be your expertise,

but I bet you got quite a bit of the way there. Tell us about that. I did get quite a bit of the way there. Primarily what that is, now it's called Poseidon, is a weapon that circumvents America's missile defense systems. So no matter how good our missile defense systems may be in the future, and even though it's our position that we are not trying to target Russia with missile

defense, the reality is that we're working on anti-Merve, multiple independent reentry vehicle systems, which are pretty obviously targeted at Russia. So no matter how advanced those systems may be, the reality is that they aren't going to work under the ocean and we don't have the sonar coverage to even be able to detect where these torpedoes are in the ocean in order to target them and water is such a dense medium compared to air that the range of the signals that you send underwater is so limited that building that kind of sensor array is really infeasible and so the idea is basically just to take advantage of the oceans to be able to to bypass America's defenses. I think what's interesting is that there was really huge alarm in the United States about the nuclear torpedo, the intercontinental nuclear torpedo being announced, that there was this fear acting like the Russians were crazy

in order to deploy a system like this. And part of what I was working on it, M. Gimome, was an argument that this was actually a fundamentally stabilizing weapon, because if you compare it to a nuclear an intercontinental nuclear missile, where if you fire it, then you only have a matter of minutes until it hits its target. And so in the case of accidental launch, or in the case of a misidentification of launch, you have the potential to instigate a crisis really rapidly, a slow-moving torpedo gives you the leeway, where if this thing gets launched, you could have hours or even depending on where it's launched from days to cooperate with the other side, to try to resolve the crisis, to locate the system and destroy it, or if it's still operational

to have it commanded to turn around. And so I think that it's actually a much safer weapon in many regards than traditional ICBMs, but it's interesting. It sort of shows how numb we've gotten to the idea of nuclear war in ICBMs. We hear about ICBMs, so we hear about ICBMs. much that I think people don't freak out about them. And the idea of a nuclear torpedo causing tsunamis around our coastlines really struck some sort of deep psychological cord, I would say. Yeah. All right. Now, I guess let's change the subject to Kazakhstan. Sure. I'm afraid I'm missing something here on Ukraine. Well, yeah, no, I want to go back to Ukraine real quick. Just how alarmed are you right now? Because I guess I was feeling a little

bit better about it after reading Ray McGovern there talking with him that it was really the missile deal that they wanted to hear you know but I understand what you're saying about that they still have reasons for concern I'm pretty alarmed because I think that the United States has been offering the the missile deal behind the scenes and that that has not altered Russia's behavior significantly and that the fact that Russia is going ahead with these quote-unquote drills in in Belarus the fact that I'm hearing Russian reservists being called up to staff up their units. Is that confirmed?

I don't, I mean, I can't say it's confirmed, confirmed, but there's a lot of noise about that, enough that I think that it's true. And so look, those may be precautionary measures, and the Russians, the Russian position is, by the way, that they're worried about the Ukrainian military using force right now in the Donbos region, and that these are defensive measures in case they need to intervene to stop a significant Ukrainian offensive. So my point is not so much that it's clear that the Russians are preparing an imminent invasion of Ukraine.

It's just that there's enough that continues to happen to make me concerned. And look, I'm very sympathetic to the view that Ray McGovern offered. That would have been my proposal, right? If I was trying to negotiate to resolve the crisis, the proposal that I would have put on the table and that I would have been, frankly, pretty optimistic about working would have been, let's have a commitment to not station missiles in Ukraine because that's what Vladimir Putin said he was most concerned about. That was what he highlighted in his speeches.

So I would hope that that would be the main concern of the Russia. and that it would resolve the situation. My concern is it doesn't today, at least, seem to have worked. So I remain pretty concerned. Yeah. All right. Now, you had a pretty compelling thread about what was going on in Kazakhstan there and whether or not it was or included aspects of color-coded revolution-type interference.

But go ahead. Well, I think that that thread was largely misunderstood because my point was not so much that it was clear that what happened. in Kazakhstan was a color revolution. My point was more that when we have entities like the National Endowment for Democracy that make all these anti-government grants inside unstable states, it's really dangerous for us because if there is a revolution, then the Russians connect the dots and they blame us. And that it really is kind of irrelevant whether or not the revolution is objectively caused by that kind of support, whether that support is a partial cause.

You know, people can slice that up however they want. The reality is that it's dangerous and destabilizing for us to provide the funding regardless because when inevitably there is political turmoil in those states, it looks like there's the smoking gun that's left behind. So I oppose that kind of funding regardless of whether it's really effective in destabilizing governments. All right. So, yeah, let's get back to the American possible role there in a second, but give us the background about Kazakhstan, because it's such an important country, and yet it's such a long way from here, as Luke Skywalker might say. Right. So Kazakhstan is a huge

country. It's about the size of Western Europe. It has the largest continuous land border in the world with Russia. You know, our border with Canada is technically longer, but it's divided between Alaska and the continental United States. So that border is huge. The north of Kazakhstan contains a tremendous number of ethnic Russians. And Kazakhstan is itself of huge strategic interest to Russia because it's where they have their primary cosmodrome to launch their rockets and also where they do their missile defense testing. And so Kazakhstan is an area of great strategic interest to Russia and one that had remained relatively stable

under the leadership of Nazarbayev, the president. He had recently been replaced by his hand-picked successor to Kiev, but there was a power-sharing agreement where Nazarbayev remained in control of the Security Council in Kazakhstan. And so even though he wasn't the president, he was in charge of the military and the security forces. Did they even hold an election or did he just hand the power over to this guy? There was nominally an election, but I don't think that anyone really believes that elections in Kazakhstan are legitimate.

You know, there's sort of like elections in North Korea. They, you know, there's something like, you know, I forget, 99% or something in that sphere of approval for Takayev as president. So, you know, I may have that number slightly off, but it's in the ballpark. And so, but what was really striking is that Takayev had announced that there was going to be a reduction in the fuel subsidy that was keeping the price of liquefied petroleum gas down, which is used not just as cooking fuel there, but as gas for automobiles. And once that happened that that scheduled reduction in the subsidy, there was a huge uprising, primarily in Almaty, the former capital and the largest city in the country.

But what's interesting is that even once he announced that the fuel subsidy would be reintroduced, that was not enough to placate the protesters. And I used protesters loosely because they killed a lot of people and they used a lot of heavy weapons. And so that's where you get into this question of, were they really protesters, or was this something more nefarious? And it sure looked like a color revolution or an incidence of hybrid war because they were making these very direct political demands about cutting all relations with Russia. At the same time that they were attacking key government facilities, taking police and military as prisoners.

And so that that would be why there was so much concern about U.S. involvement, or at least Western involvement. You know, it might have been Turkey. It might have been other outside actors. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, they've got great deals on weed at the hempspot.com. The hemp spot specializes in Delta 8 tetrahydro-canabinal instead of Delta 9, so they can send it straight to you anywhere in America. Recently, a friend moved and didn't have a guy in his new town. But then he heard about the hemp spot.

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Right. Yeah, it does seem like this is the common theme. It was reminiscent. I mean, it's a correlation, not necessarily proven causation or anything. In Syria, you had a lot of, you know, spontaneous protests as part of the Arab Spring days of rage all across the region. But then at the same time, he had guys with rifles who immediately came out and started assassinating cops. You know what I mean? It was on from these certain prepared factions to turn.

a protest movement into something else. But then, you know, if you say that, then people go, oh, well, but look at the protesters. They're poor. They live in a dictatorship. Their price of fuel was raised, and now they can't put food on their family. And so of course, they're protesting

and you're siding with the bad guys against them when, you know, protesters are kind of irrelevant when you have an armed insurrection going on. They're kind of, you know, beside the point in a way. Not that their complaints don't matter or their rights don't matter or anything, but it's just there's a more important story going on when you have these groups

of people. And what do they do, right? They sack the banks and the airport and all these things. They seem to really be prepared, right? Can you elaborate a bit about that? Absolutely. And I would highlight something that was a little bit different about this potential color revolution than what we saw in Ukraine. This was almost like an accelerated color revolution in the sense that in Ukraine and in many of the prior color revolutions, you had these mass protests for a very, very long time. And it seemed like the goal of the protesters was to goad the security forces into using force into shooting some protesters, at which point they could then retaliate and sort of make

it look like they had a, you know, a moral justification for using force against the government. And what happened in Kazakhstan was not that at all. The security forces were, we're not shooting protesters. Instead, in the course of about three days, you went from mass protests that were suppressed not particularly aggressively to then having huge numbers of armed fighters, potentially jihadists, although that's still a little bit unclear, who were then attacking key strategic facilities. They knew where arms depots were, and they went and raided them and got access to RPGs and rifles. And so it seemed like it was very well planned. It was hard to believe that somehow protesters had just gotten incensed by the reaction of the government and had spontaneously figure out exactly where to attack and how to get arms.

And now the New York Times, you know, kind of wore their emotions on their sleeve in their news section there that says, you know, oh, man, it's already not working. The Russians are coming to shore up the government. And that was pretty much the end of this revolution, huh? It was an incredibly effective deployment by Russia. We never, and it wasn't just Russia. You know, it was this Russian-led security organization, the CSTO, the collective security treaty organization, sort of like Russia's equivalent of NATO. They had never actually engaged in a peacekeeping operation before.

And so it was really striking when immediately, within hours of the request being made, they were airlifting troops into Kazakhstan. And they had a really brilliant strategy. They didn't want their forces to be directly engaged with protesters, potentially shooting them. And so what they did was they had the foreign troops provide security for critical infrastructure in order to free up the Kazakh troops to then be the ones who were on the front lines with protesters or terrorists. And that worked really well. And essentially the revolution ended almost immediately.

I think a big part of that also was that before, many of the Kazakh security forces were defecting. You know, you see this in any unstable revolution where people are trying to figure out, look, who is the victor going to be? And they try to align themselves with the victor in order to get the best treatment possible at the end of the conflict.

And once Russia made it clear that it wasn't going to allow the government of Kazakhstan to fall, that signal alone, even without deploying more forces, was enough to show the Kazakh troops, look, this government is not going to fail, And so it would be really a mistake for us to defect. And so the defections ended right away, and that was really the end of the revolution.

All right. On the Tucker show, you brought up George Kennan and his warnings. What's the significance there? Well, the significance is that today, many of the neocons portray themselves as cold warriors. But the strategy of containment that actually won the Cold War against the Soviet Union was crafted by George Cannon, known sometimes as Mr. for his famous Mr. X article in foreign affairs where he laid out the containment strategy. And what's interesting about Kenon, well, among many things, is that he was one of the most vociferous opponents of NATO expansion. Before the first round of NATO expansion happened in 98,

he said that it was going to be one of the worst strategic mistakes in the history of the West. And then after it happened, he warned that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict with Russia, that it would lead us towards war with Russia. And when it did, that the NATO expanders would say, see, we told you the Russians were like this all along. That's why we had to expand NATO. And he said that that just wasn't the case, that the Russians would not have been so hostile if we hadn't expanded our military block to their doorstep and that we shouldn't have done it. Right. And now, I wanted to point this out.

I'm not sure who all knows this or don't, but there's this great art. article, which to me, surprisingly, is by Jerry Brown, you know, Governor Moonbeam, they call them. I don't know that much about him, but the old governor of California. I've met him a few times. Okay. So he did a review in the New York review of books, and it was a review of William Perry's book, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. And so in here, he talks, of course, about Kennan, but he also says, and I was just too young for this at the time, you know, I know all my buddies at Cato were good, Doug Bondo and Ted Carpenter and all that, but it turns out that the butcher of Asia, Robert McNamara, hey, confessed butcher of Asia.

It ain't just me. Robert McNamara agreed that we should not be doing this. And Paul Nica, who had been Kennan's rival, you know, Kenan wanted containment. Nitsa wanted rollback, and he was the guy that wrote NSC-68 and all of that. He also said we should not be doing this. And there's a whole list of Hawks, and I'm sorry, I'm looking at it now, there's a paywall. I've tried to pull it up here, but people can look that up, put it in archive.is, and they'll show you the whole thing there. And you can see where people who were, never mind Pat Buchanan and the paleo-conservatives, who also were very harsh anti-communists

when the communist controlled Russia that but even people like NHTSA and McNamara were agreeing with Kenan and saying this is a huge mistake to do I think that what's oh and I'm sorry and Perry himself apparently was fired is this right Perry himself I believe was fired from the Clinton administration over his opposition

to it he was the Secretary of Defense and Clinton went with his secretary of state and with his old buddy Strob Talbot Yeah, I mean, I think that what's really interesting is that if you look at the course of NATO expansion, and not just from the NATO expansion that's happened, but also the declaration of the intent to further expand NATO in 2008, that the rationales that were given at the time don't line up at all with the rationales that we see today. So in 2008, when there was this proposal that was adopted saying that we are going to expand NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia, nobody was saying that the reason we were going to do that is because Russia was a revanchus power that was going to take over these territories. Instead, the message to Vladimir Putin and the Russians was, look, this has nothing to do with you. This isn't hostile at all. this is just the natural development of an alliance that isn't even pointed at Russia.

And it was the critics of it who said, look, the Russians are going to see this as directed at them. And for that reason, it's going to be destabilizing. Now, that prediction was completely true. Like, it was just absolutely vindicated. We now find ourselves on the brink of this horrible conflict with Russia. And the advocates of native expansion have thrown away that prior justification saying, oh, it's not threatening towards Russia, and instead are saying, well, actually, Russia was aggressive all along,

and that's why we needed to have expanded NATO. And so you really see them moving the goalposts to defend their own policies. Yep, absolutely right. And of course, as you said in that famous piece, now word from X by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, as predicted perfectly in the year 1998. As soon as Russia reacts, the same people say now that they won't react because this isn't about them, we'll say, well, that's why we had to do it because of all of their aggression. Exactly. Exactly. They said Russia wouldn't react.

Then Russia did. And now they say, that's why we had to expand NATO. Yeah, thanks crazy. Hey, I found the paragraph here. Bob McNamara, Sam Nunn, Bill Bradley, Paul Nitsa, Richard Pipes and John Holdren. And Richard Pipes

even. Richard Pipes. And Robert Gates was one of them, too. The guy who had been the head of the CIA, which that was surprising to me that even Robert Gates had opposed it then. Of course, the guy that later became Secretary of Defense for W. Bush and then Barack Obama. Well, I mean, these guys must have all been Russian agents then, right? Obviously, anyone who exposes naval expansion today must be a Russian agent. So, you know, by the same logic, all of these men should be questioned in regards to their loyalty. Yeah. I mean, that, to me, it's just jaw-dropped.

right Richard pipes and hey if Bob McNamara is telling you that what you're doing is too aggressive you should heed his counsel that's my idea you know alarm should be going off at minimum i strongly agree and it and it just shows you that the these today that the people that we have advocating these positions are sort of fundamentally unsurious because these were uh you know you may disagree with them significantly, but they were serious thinkers about U.S. foreign policy. And I think that part of what's so scary is that we've reached a point where the people who are in charge, the people who are charting the course of our foreign policy really

seem to be ideologues of a sort that we didn't even have, that they're not willing to look at the reality of international relations and the dangers of what they're proposing. And so I really wish that we had this prior era of statesmen still. around to rein in the excesses of our foreign policy. All right. I'm sorry for giving you so long, but I got one more question here. It goes to somebody that you quote tweeted here when they were criticizing you. I forgot which one it was, but it's the common understanding and theme even when unstated,

which is that if we had already brought Ukraine into NATO, then they wouldn't dare try it. Right. This is not aggression. Really. It's just we're extending our security. umbrella to as many people as possible so that no one will ever mess with them because then they'd be messing with us and no one will ever mess with us no matter what and so all that we do really here is just keeping the peace and that clearly is the way they see it it's it's a remarkable

thing then there's there's so many things wrong with that argument uh as you just alluded to the the end point of that argument is the idea that we should probably just expand nato to the entire world because then there would be no war. If we just had a military block that extended to the borders of the earth, then there would be no conflict. A more direct response would be that one of the reasons that it was so stupid to say that we were going to add Ukraine to NATO was that it was clear that that was a red line for Russia. And so they were never going to allow it to happen. And so, yeah, maybe in a perfect world, if there were some way to add Ukraine to NATO without destabilizing Ukraine, you could argue that it would be a good thing

to do. But we live in a world where Ukraine's neighbor is Russia, where Russia's vital strategic national interests are threatened in their view by us adding Ukraine to NATO. And so it was clear that they were going to take whatever measures they had to in order to stop that from happening. And the ongoing instability in Ukraine is intimately connected with that because obviously you can't add a state into NATO that is an ongoing condition of war because then basically you're just declaring war at the time that you add them. And so we basically drew this giant target on Ukraine saying to Russia, hey, come destabilize this state because we want to add them to NATO. And if you want to stop that, then you need to instigate conflict inside the country on your border. And so it's just these people are operating in this hypothetical world where if Ukraine could just instantly become a NATO member state without any opportunity for Russia to intervene, that would be a good thing. But it bears no resemblance to reality.

I just, well, can I just say quickly that as bad as what David French was saying is, and it's pretty bad, that what's crazier is that there was this op-ed last week that I mentioned on Tucker's show from this woman, Evelyn Farkas, she was a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration, and she was a senior advisor to the Supreme Allied commander of NATO. And in this op-ed in defense one, she argued that we need to give the Russians an ultimatum, that they have to leave Crimea, and that if they don't, that we should put together a coalition of the willing and then force them out. And, Scott, I don't know that I can find words to convey to your viewers how crazy this proposal is. You might as well tell the Russians, get out of Moscow, we're going to invade. That is like how closely connected to Crimea the Russians are. From their perspective, it is their sovereign territory. And even though they on paper have a no first use policy, I sincerely believe that if they were losing a conventional war over Crimea, Crimea, I think they would use nuclear weapons to defend it. And so I think that this woman is proposing basically starting World War III.

And the idea that people like this are involved in senior positions of government should be terrifying to everyone. Well, she does go pretty far in here, although, you know, I heard you say that on the Tucker show, and I couldn't find that part of it. There's a couple of mentions of Crimea in here. So if you look at the bottom, she doesn't say Crimea, what she says is that we have to give them an ultimatum about occupied territory, right? But it's clear that when she says occupied territory, that that includes Crimea. She considers Crimea to be occupied territory. So the ultimatum that she wants to give Russia includes Crimea. No, I see what you're saying there.

You're right. I guess the implication earlier in the article seems more like she's just talking about the Donbass. Because everybody knows Crimea is a fait accompli, right? But maybe that was just me. I think you're right. No, I don't. She does seem to be going that far here. you're right yeah i i read that as her saying that we need that that that is that crimea is occupied

territory and that uh we have to roll back uh russia from that territory oh yeah and she's also saying they got to get out of south o'setia and obcasia too right exactly everywhere and that's just even though you know they're in south o's etia on an agreement that was signed with the european union in the first place so it's hard to call that an in invasion and aggression really right one would think so all right well anyway I really appreciate

your time on the show it's been really great and I'll be following these great threads on Twitter that's been my pleasure thank you so much I really enjoyed it Scott all right you guys that is Clint Ehrlich it's E H R-I-C-H and you can find him on Twitter

at Clint Ehrlich The Scott Horton show anti-war radio can be heard on K-P-F-K 90.7 FM in LA. APSRadio.com anti-war.com Scott Horton.org and Libertarian Institute.org