Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/30/22 Ted Galen Carpenter on the Arrogance Behind Washington’s Foreign Policy

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

Scott talks with Cato Senior Fellow Ted Galen Carpenter about American interventions in Ukraine and Syria. They dig into the likeliest escalation scenarios in Ukraine and imagine how both sides would react to defeat. That leads to a discussion about the social psychology behind Washington’s foreign policy decisions. They also look to the terror wars and tie their talk on American foreign policy psychology to the ongoing war in Syria.  Discussed on the show: “How Will the Blob React if Ukraine Faces Defeat?” (Antiwar.com) “What Do Think Tanks Think? Proximity to Power and Foreign Policy Preferences” (Foreign Policy Analysis) “Washington’s Dubious Syria Intervention Continues” (Cato.org) Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Carpenter has written 10 books including America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course over Taiwan and most recently NATO: Dangerous Dinosaur. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative Magazine and the National Interest. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: 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

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right y'all on the line i've got ted galen carpenter senior fellow at the cato institute and author of a great many books including his latest unreliable watchdog the news media and u.s.

foreign policy welcome back to the show ted how are you doing oh thanks very much scott uh happy to have you here on the show and uh happy to talk to you about i've been looking forward to talking to you about this piece that you wrote for antiwar dot com how will the blob react if ukraine faces defeat and i'll go ahead and add to that how will the russian blob react if the russian military faces defeat best i can tell from here and i'm no real military expert, you know, I just rely on them. It seems to me sort of like the unstoppable force versus the immovable object where you have ultimately a larger Russian military and a larger Russian nation behind it with superior numbers of artillery forces and all these things as they've had in

their advantage. On the other hand, the Ukrainians have home field advantage. Their morale is high or at least higher because they're fighting in defense from a foreign invasion, and they've got a blank check from the United States and our wealthy European allies and all this high-tech equipment, drones and high Mars and this and that. I don't really know exactly how much difference that makes, and I don't know what all claims from either side amount to mostly propaganda compared to what's really happening there. But it just seems to me like we're not anywhere near a conclusion one way or the other through victory for one side or the other or through a negotiated settlement either. So how do you assess all of that, Ted?

Yeah, I think that's correct. This war is going to go on for some time yet. And from the standpoint of U.S. policymakers, that's just fine. They're using Ukraine as a proxy to bleed Russia to humiliate Russia. And the great fear that I've had up to this point is that the strategy may succeed to the point that Vladimir Putin's government concludes that it has nothing to lose by escalating, including possibly, even to the level of using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. However, now, if the staunch supporters of Ukraine prove out to be right, we're facing the prospect of nuclear war with Russia. And that is something I don't think any sensible person should want. Now, my article looked at the opposite.

aspect. What happens if, as I think may occur this winter with a Russian counteroffensive, Ukraine clearly begins to lose. And how will the foreign policy establishment in the United States, the whole military industrial complex, react? And my fear is they would want to escalate, that they would want to do whatever is necessary to prevent a Western defeat in Ukraine. And that could be equally dangerous. Yeah. And, you know, this is something that John Mearsheimer warned about last summer, as he said, you know, just play this out.

Neither side can lose this thing. From the Russians' point of view, this is of the absolute highest strategic importance. And from the American's point of view, even though it's really not of the highest strategic importance at all, in terms of just Ukraine itself, weakening Russia is, as you said there. and they've talked so much smack about this, you know, as long as it takes at any cost and including Crimea to and all of these things, they have drawn the line in a way where Biden would have to be willing to accept absolute humiliation to just say, well, the Russians

won the war. What are you going to do? We're not going to escalate this, you know, in a way that makes it that much more dangerous, right? He doesn't have the courage to back down instead he would have to pretend look at how brave i am by escalating right well john meersheimer is one of our finest foreign policy thinkers and he is right far more often than he's wrong and in this case i think he's definitely right i don't see the u.s foreign policy military establishment backing down if its proxy begins to lose and yet That is probably the most likely outcome. One of the statistics that came out with not all that much fanfare was a comment by General Millie.

They added the Joint Chiefs of Staff last autumn, in which he pointed out that the Russian forces had lost more than 100,000 dead and wounded in the war. But what he added, which received surprisingly little attention, was that Ukraine had also suffered more than 100,000 dead and wounded. But Russia's population is three and a half times that of Ukraine's. There is a war of attrition. There's almost no way that Ukraine can win. Russia can absorb these terrible casualties far easier than Ukraine can. And Putin is not, I think, shy about shedding Russian blood to achieve his objectives. So looking over the medium and long term, prospects for Ukraine victory are not very good at all. Yeah, you know, the Americans, you hear him talk from time to time, especially the think tank types, I guess.

about how, yeah, no, it's good to kill Russians and send Russians home in body bags because then, see, it's just like in Afghanistan in the 80s, Ted, it causes controversy inside Russia and it'll undermine support for Putin and what he's doing. And popular opinion will turn harder and harder against him, just like poor Gorbachev in Afghanistan. Stuck with that war, right? Well, I've pointed out that the U.S. is using the 1980s Afghanistan strategy in Ukraine, but there is a huge difference. Ukraine is far, far more important to Russia than Afghanistan ever was. Afghanistan was a bit of a side show for the Russian military and the Russian political establishment, the Soviet political and military establishment to be more accurate.

Ukraine is not. Ukraine is a central strategic interest, a core security interest for Russia. And Russia is not going to accept defeat in Ukraine. This is not Afghanistan repeated from the standpoint of Moscow. It's only Afghanistan repeated from the standpoint of Washington. And that is a very, very dangerous situation. Now, if I know my history right, I hope, correct me from Iran, but Afghanistan was the only stand that was not part of the USSR, right? Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and all of them were, but here we're talking about Ukraine was not just a member of the USSR. They were actually one of the republics, right? Not just a, in other words, not just a member of the Warsaw Pact alliance with the commies, but one of the closer to Moscow countries even compared to, say, you know, Poland,

which was under Soviet domination, but wasn't an actual member of the, I don't know how they break that down. You know what I mean. Yeah, Ukraine was a constituent part of the Soviet Union, and it was also realistically the second most important part of the Soviet Union. So this is a high level interest strategically and economically for Russia. And the U.S. and its allies ignored that point as it pushed NATO right to the border of Russia, using Ukraine very much as a pawn, making Ukraine a NATO asset, and indeed almost a NATO member in all but name. The United States and its allies pouring weapons into Ukraine, training Ukrainian troops, conducting in at least a few cases joint cyber attacks with Ukraine on Russian targets.

So the point that some of the critics have made well, there wasn't really a prospect given French and German opposition to Ukrainian membership in NATO. There was little prospect that Kiev would be able to join the alliance anytime soon. That misses the point that Ukraine was becoming a crucial NATO asset militarily against Russia. And eventually that produced the kind of reaction that one should have expected. But, of course, our brilliant political leaders apparently didn't expect it. Well, I mean, that's a separate question, you know, whether they actually were kind of baiting them into it, I think. is at least a reasonable hypothesis.

I mean, the policy one year ago was to tell Putin, you better not. But they were not willing to negotiate in good faith whatsoever. And they've bragged about that since then. Derek Chollett from the National Security Council told the War on the Rocks podcast that we refused to discuss NATO with them whatsoever. We wouldn't even talk about it. We wouldn't even agree to put it on the table for discussion whatsoever. So I think there's a, well, do you think there's a real question, whether they were kind of, I don't know, deliberately provoking it, but maybe thinking, you know, 40%, you know, 60% we want them to not invade, but 40% if they do, it wouldn't be that bad anyway.

As you said, the Afghan model, right? We'll bleed them to bankruptcy. It'll be great. Just like bin Laden just finished doing us. Yeah, I think that thought was in their mind, but the primary goal was to humiliate Russia to achieve. the objective of bringing Ukraine in as a NATO front-line state, a NATO asset, and they underestimated Russia's determination to prevent that from happening. I never underestimate the possibility of malice in U.S. foreign policy, but I'm also aware that one should not attribute to malice, things that can be explained by sheer arrogance and incompetence. And I think that was probably the more likely explanation for what Washington was doing. Which it makes sense.

Like if you take the timeline of last year where, you know, they met in July after the Americans had done their big military exercises in the Black Sea. And then Putin wrote that article about, you know, his claim of his interpretation of the history of Ukraine and Russia and all that. And then what they do? They brought Zelensky to DC and they issued all these new strategic partnership plans and reaffirmed their intention to bring Ukraine into NATO and all these things. So in other words, you know, agreeing with your theory here of just their arrogance, blinding them, that this is the only way that they know of to deal with something like this. They weren't going to say to Putin, okay, look, man, here, let's

negotiate a way out of this. Their immediate take was, oh, and I meant to say there too, he had built up his forces on the Russian side of the border as well last summer, summer before last 2021. And then their reaction was just to escalate, right? To promise more strategic partnership, more interoperability and all of these things. The Russians will have to back down to us. We'll never back down to them. I've written a couple of pieces on what I've called Washington's style of capitulation diplomacy that there are rarer cases in which there is genuine bargaining taking place when the United States has a certain objective.

Instead, they want to gain the complete humiliation of the other party, the complete capitulation of the other party. And I think that was what was operating with their relationship with Russia. Going back a good many years, not just the Biden administration, but previous administrations as well, that Russia was a weak country and that we could achieve all of our policy objectives without Moscow resorting to force. That was a bluff. I remember so many statements from U.S. officials and throughout the news media in 2020 and 2021 that Putin's threats, his warnings of red lines not to be crossed with respect to Ukraine. That was all a bluff.

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That's rrbi.co. You'll be glad you did. Well, so now I know that really you're right up there at least tied for first place in Washington, D.C. with people who warned against NATO expansion in the 1990s, at the very least, I know you said so in 1994. I would not be surprised to find out that you said so even earlier than that. And clearly, your arguments then, and everybody who agreed with you, too, the argument was we're drawing a dividing line in Europe. We're leaving the Russians on the other side of it. They're going to see this as a hostile threat, and they're going to end up reacting.

but then so here's my setup for the question though is yeah but it took 30 years for them to react and maybe there's a correlation but not a causation the american war party says that come on ted this is just a pretext the reality is that vladimir putin wants to be a great czar and so he wants to reincorporate the four eastern oblasts of ukraine and his land bridge to crimeia and all these things before he dies of old age somehow and so So then he pretended to be upset about all this NATO thing because he read a couple of good Cato books about it and said, oh, there's my pretext. So what do you say to that?

Well, first of all, the objection to NATO expansion from the Russian side was already occurring under Boris Jelson. And Putin's initial comments about it were almost regretful. Why are you doing this? you're damaging relations with Russia. And there's no need to do that. It was only when the United States and its allies kept pushing that his warnings became less friendly and far more pointed. To me, there's no doubt that Putin had ambitions to restore Russia's power to at least some extent. But no country, no major power would tolerate having a hostile military

alliance move to its border without reacting badly to that. That is an extremely provocative, unfriendly act, and any government that was the target of that act is going to eventually dig in its heels and respond militarily. It just took enough time for Russia to build up the military strength that it felt it needed and to conclude there was no chance of compromise with the United States and the other major NATO countries on this issue. And when that happened, the invasion of Ukraine began. Well, so now back to the beginning here about the

consensus among the American War Party and how they might react in the case of very bad news in this war. I don't know if you saw this, but I know you'll already have an opinion about it. Either way, there's a study by, not just an article about it, but a study by Max Abrams and Richard Hanania, where they kind of chart out in a professor kind of a way on graph paper and everything about the proximity of foreign policy thinkers to Washington, D.C. and their views and where essentially the professors tend to be more realists or doves, but the think tankers are all hawks. And they even start out with the example from the fall of 2002 when all those international

relations experts said we should not attack Iraq. But they just didn't count because it was the think tanks had the consensus that said, you know, we damn well better and we're going to. And And so I just wondered about, well, the social psychology of this whole thing. I mean, you cite in this article about, you know, what Ann Applebaum thinks. And my initial reaction is, who cares what Ann Applebaum thinks? But then the answer is a lot of people care what Ann Applebaum thinks. And the completely ridiculous and frankly stupid and wrong things that she thinks are very representative of the consensus of the rulers in Washington. This is what they talk about at their cocktail parties.

This is the editorial line at the Washington Post. All for good reason. This is what they believe. And there doesn't seem to be much room in there. For, you know, you got to hand it to him. Old Ted Carpenter at Cato, he did make some correct predictions and has some astute analysis here. You just don't get that at all, right? There's just no nuance.

There's no, you know, real break in the consensus. It's a total group thing up there. Yeah, there's very little self-refer. reflection either about their own mistakes, which are now enormous in number, and not just on the Ukraine issue as we all know, a good many issues going back decades. And yet there's this pervasive unwillingness to admit error. I go into this in the unreliable watchdog book, the alliance, if you will, between the news media and politically, and officials in the national security state, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department,

and so on. And this is one big community that has become a bubble. They talk to each other, they reinforce each other's beliefs and assumptions, often beliefs and assumptions that are horribly wrong. But that is the community that determines policy. And outsiders may be absolutely correct on a particular issue. It doesn't matter, unfortunately. That blob, and that's an accurate term forth, it was coined by, ironically, Barack Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor have been Rhodes, but that thing just continues to dominate policy. And we have really seen that with Ukraine, where dissent has been vilified and often silenced, simply because that is challenging conventional wisdom and the network of vested

interest. Let's face it, a lot of people are prospering from the $100 billion. of U.S. tax money being given to Ukraine. And they don't want to get that up. That's a lot of money. And yeah, I appreciate the way you talk about how ironic it is that Ben Rhodes coined that term since he could be the executive vice president of the blob himself.

He's the guy that told the New York Times last February or March that this is our redemption. Russia's invasion of Ukraine erases Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, none of that ever happened. All that imperial hubris and overreach, that era is now the past and the future is now

America redeemed, fighting for the little guy against the evil empire. How do you like it? Well, that was never an accurate description of U.S. policy at any point in recent decades, certainly.

And I think... Don't you remember that time we say France from the Nazis? Yeah, that's the... probably the last thing they can cite that fits their narrative. But what we're going to see is not redemption for the blunders in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and so many other places. It's simply going to be the latest and most serious blunder that the establishment has committed. Yeah. And speaking of which in the last few minutes here, you know, that narrative

that the terror war is over, is really not right. And you have a piece here about at cato.org about staying in Syria. There was just a new report that came out yesterday. Their DOD claims they killed 700 ISIS terrorists in Iraq and Syria in the last year, Ted. So what does that tell you? Yeah, the so-called war on terror is still going on. It's just not receiving nearly as much attention that it was receiving a few years ago. But it's still taking place a lot of attacks on innocent civilians, total disruption of a number of other societies, the tragedies in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen,

horrifying situations that the U.S. brought about. And yet those things are, continuing they're just now flying beneath the radar because of so much attention to ukraine yeah well you know at the end of 2019 when somebody fired some rockets at americans at a base in or was at the end of 2018 now i'm getting all this you know um somebody fired rockets at an american base in iraq and there was a back and forth that culminated in Donald Trump's assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Quds Force, and then the Ayatollah fired some missiles at an empty corner of an American base in Iraq. That could have escalated to a real war with Iran right there. And there was a

reporter, I forget her name now, but an Iraqi reporter that I interviewed that said that the area where this base was, there was no telling who fired those rockets. Yeah, it could have been Khatib al-Hezbollah, this group, you know, said to be backed by Iran, this Shiite militia. But it could have been ISIS, too, or, you know, al-Qaeda types. And they would have every reason in the world to do a false flag-type attack on Americans to try to get us to fight against the Shiites. You know, our allies, who we've been embedded with over there all these years when we're not fighting against them, we're fighting for them.

And so it wasn't even really clear who did that attack that ended up. you know, coming very close to leading, you know, to an actual war between the United States and Iran. And we had a more recent incident, too, just a few months after Joe Biden took office, in which there were alleged attacks by pro-Iranian Iraqi forces on targets in Iraq and Syria. And Biden responded with missile attacks. again on targets in both of those countries, supposedly terrorist installations. So again, this thing is simmering, and it wouldn't take that much to bring it to a boil again.

And then, but the whole reason we're there is to fight against the radical Sunnis, right? It's not the pretext for our occupation in Syria and Iraq is fighting against what's left of ISIS. And yet, as we're talking about here, we're almost, you. You know, we're in a position to get into a conflict with our de facto allies, the Iranians' friends and the Shiites, especially in Iraq. Well, keep in mind, the intervention in Syria was largely to overthrow Bashar al-Assad because of his alliance with Iran. So you can't keep the enemy straight without a scorecard when it comes to U.S. policy in that part of the world. Yeah, that's crazy. So now, what are they really doing in Syria?

Because, I mean, obviously, if the war was really just against the Islamic State, Donald Trump announced victory against the Islamic State as a state back at the very beginning of 2018. He finished up Iraq War III in the first year of his presidency there. They took back, you know, Raqa has been under the control of the SDF, and the Shiites took back control over Mosul in Iraq and all of that. And so I wonder if you think that this is really still just a pretext. Fighting ISIS in Syria is just a pretext to continue to keep the pressure on Iran's friend Assad. I think that's largely true.

There's certainly a determination among clocks in Washington to weaken Iran as much as humanly possible. that's pretty much been U.S. policy for decades. And anyone who dare become an ally of Iran is courting trouble. That was Bashar Assad's great sin. It wasn't that he was a brutal dictator. Yes, he certainly is. But the fact that he was in bed with the Islamic government in Tehran, that was his great sin. The United States has had no problem with brutal dictators and supporting them over the decades, for heaven's sakes. One of the closest relationships is with the Saudi royal family and another one with the government of Egypt. Both of those are horrified corrupt and brutal. But Washington has no problem with that. They did have a problem with Assad because of Assad's support of Iran. And that appears

to be a high priority item. I would watch, again, just beneath the radar while all the attention is on Ukraine, watch out for this one, an escalation of the confrontation with Iran and any country that allies itself with Iran. Yep. Well, and they just finished essentially tearing up the JCPOA. Biden's on video announcing we're not getting back into the nuclear deal. Right. other avenue of escalation there. But, you know, I don't know. America, we got our act together, Ted. Everything is great here. And that's why we're ready to remake Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and who am I leaving off the list that needs to go? There was a coup in Peru. I guess the good guys won there, meaning the American puppets one in that one. Am I right?

Good guess. I don't want to get into that one because I don't think there are good guys on either side of that dispute. But the United States has ambitious objectives that greatly, greatly exceed the ability of Washington to achieve those objectives. And very few members of the defense and foreign policy establishment in the U.S., the national security state seem to understand that at all. we're riding high and are strategically over-extended, economically over-extended by a huge margin. All right, you guys, that's Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow at the Cato Institute. At cato.org is Washington's dubious Syria intervention continues at anti-war.com. How will the blob react if Ukraine faces defeat?

and the new book is Unreliable Watchdog, the news media, and U.S. foreign policy. Thank you very much, Ted. Appreciate you. My pleasure. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.