Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/24/23 Chas Freeman: America Needs to Use Diplomacy

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

Scott interviewed Chas Freeman about some of the biggest flashpoints that threaten to plunge the world into war. They discuss the war in Ukraine, the growing tension over Taiwan and even touch on the next conflict brewing in the Middle East. Freeman argues that the prospect for war with Russia or China depends on Washington’s willingness to sit down and work out a peaceful resolution. So far, the U.S. government has shown no such interest. Discussed on the show: “Why War Pledges for Ukraine Fell Flat in Munich” (Defense One) Chas W. Freeman was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs from 1993-94 and served as U. S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Follow him at his website, chasfreeman.net. 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

Hey, you guys, sir, for the delay on this, Mr. Freeman had some real bad noise on his line, and I had to get my guy to find some time and get around to fix it for me. So, anyway, here it is. It's a great interview of Chas Freeman from the 24th of February. 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 2003, almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show.

All right, you guys, on the line. I've got Chos Freeman, the former diplomat, and he was the translator, right-hand man, for Richard Nixon when he went and made peace with China back when. And he was kind of a legend in diplomatic circles. He was almost the chair of the National Intelligence Council under Obama, but the Israel lobby got him. And he's in high demand on the lecture circuit because he knows so dang much. And if I had my way, he'd probably be the Secretary of State right now. Welcome to show, Chas. How are you, sir? I'm very well, thank you, but I am very happy not to be Secretary of State.

I bet. Well, I got to ask you, though, what you might do now, if you were. I'm just, I can't believe that Anthony Blinken seems to just be, you know, a like-seeking a poll on a magnet with that Sergei Lavrov, and they just cannot talk to save their lives, to save all our lives. Well, I think the United States has fallen into a very bad pattern, and Secretary Lincoln exemplifies it. We accuse people, we condemn them, we insult them, we rile them up. We don't try to persuade them.

We don't talk to them. And you can see this pattern most clearly in the Alaska meeting between the U.S. and China at the start of the Biden administration. which turned into an exchange of recriminations. Same thing happened in Munich. Now, I know the people on the Chinese side very well, and this is not normal for them. So when you see a pattern like this, you ought to ask yourself,

why is this happening? What could we do to change it? Because the issues at stake are really very, very serious. I think all the balloonacy that we went through with the Chinese balloon that the Chinese say blew off course, and I think that's very credible. We had a polar vortex and a shift of the jet stream at just that moment. The military were quite sober-minded about it. It said it wasn't really much of a threat to anybody, and that they'd taken steps to ensure that it couldn't collect any.

significant intelligence, but our political elite went berserk. And Secretary Lincoln and the administration were very much part of that hysteria. It makes us look a bit foolish international. We fly three to four intrusive reconnaissance flights along China's 12-mile limit every day. We have had our own balloon programs as early is the 1950s. The Chinese say we're doing it again. I don't know whether that's true or not,

but it certainly can't be ruled out. But more importantly, for much of the world, those countries without significant air forces or air defenses, we are flying drones all over the place without regard to their sovereignty. So I think people look at this and they see our hysterical reaction and write it off to the combination of lack of self-control and hypocrisy.

Yeah, well, I even saw that they have, I admit, it was just the headline. I didn't delve too far into it, but apparently the Americans have a balloon surveillance program over China and over Asia. You know, it's almost like the joke about Donald Trump for every tweet that he accuses anyone else of that, like, every single time he did it himself, that kind of thing? Well, there's such a pattern, unfortunately. We have had a balloon program of various sorts, and it has been tied to our intelligence community. Now we don't, we still don't know what this Chinese balloon was really doing. The Chinese say it was devoted mostly to meteorological research. The FBI's got the equipment.

They're examining it, and they're not saying anything. And, you know, what if it turns out it really was not much but meteorological instruments. Right. Yeah, I mean, that's at least what the military told the Washington Post was, yeah, it looks like it. And by the way, you know, my friend David Hathaway is a sheriff in Arizona, and the feds have a surveillance blitz. not over the border, but over the suburbs in the name of the border, but that's in the United States.

Straight out of some dystopian novel going on right now. The Chinese don't have any authority over us. The Fed should do. Now, these are aerostats, and they enable a radar to get up to a hike where they can see farther over the horizon. And, yeah, we have had quite a big program like this. started mainly to stop drug smuggling, but I suppose it's also useful for other purposes. Yeah, parallel construction for building up cases on regular people.

All right, so now, obviously, the empire seems to be biting off more than they can chew. Maybe, I mean, they're heightening tensions in Iran and North Korea, but never even mind that because look at what's going on in Ukraine and the threat of major power war with China over Taiwan. And I wonder, I guess, you just pick which you think is the bigger worry today and talk about that one first if you want. Like, for example, well, which you prefer to address first here? And I'll come up with a good question, maybe. The major danger of the moment clearly is Ukraine.

Sure. Because it's a war of attrition and we're locked into a cycle of escalation with the Russians. Nobody on our side has put forward any proposal for a negotiated solution to the problem. In fact, it began after we rebuffed several Russian efforts to get a negotiation. And it was that straight arming of the Russians that led Putin to make his own. disastrous decision to invade Ukraine. So nobody has a war termination strategy, and nobody seems on our side seems to be interested in anything but fighting on to the last Ukrainian.

And the Russians, and we both are mired in state propaganda, war propaganda, which means that the Russian people don't have any real idea what's happening. in Ukraine, but also we don't have any real idea. Everything we learn is from a Ukrainian optic, from a Ukrainian source, or from someone who is pro-Ukrainian. We never hear the other side of the story. And this is a failing of our media, which is, I think, very dangerous. The purpose of the press is to prevent the government from making mistakes.

and in this case, the government basically controls the media, in effect, and we might as well have nothing but state media. Yeah, no. In fact, speaking of that, I was torturing myself by listening to National Public Radio yesterday. It was the day before yesterday. They had a report, it was, day before yesterday. And they had a report from the Munich Security Conference where they quoted, it was an American. They played the audio at length of an American diplomat saying that,

listen, we do have to recognize that American NATO expansion into their sphere of influence, et cetera, et cetera, you know the argument, that that's real. It's very real to the Russians, and we have to accommodate that. We can't act like that doesn't matter. It does. It's part of what happened in the war. And, you know, this is National Public Radio. They wouldn't have played that at all if he was really blaming America for the thing or something like that. He wasn't going that far. He was just saying that this kind of all or nothing take, it's just not going to work on the real planet Earth where Russia is a place and a power. We have to deal with them as they are, not as Anthony Blinken might imagine when he's daydreaming or something.

I wonder if he still has a job after talking so realistically. I know. I was surprised that that actually got the airtime. I was like, right i'm whooping at something i heard on npr for the first time my life made um i think there's a bit of just for it being honest you know there's a bit of sobriety setting in because um all of the triumphal talk and um one understands obviously why belotiamer zalensky uh wants to keep the morale up in ukraine and therefore talks about going swimming in crimea on the beach next summer, but this is totally unrealistic, and I think it's coming home to people that this war is not going well for Ukraine. Ukraine has suffered hugely from it. The Russians have suffered too,

but they have a much bigger country, they have greater resources, and they can take suffering at a level that Ukraine can't. So what's going on is really tragic. Now, the Chinese have just come out with a peace proposal, a set of general principles, which I immediately have been derided by Washington, but that I suspect will have wide support internationally. And they're basically talking about starting a ceasefire talks between Russia and Ukraine helping the Russians and Ukrainians to solve their problems agree on some kind of end to the war and to they're insisting on opening up the grain exports from the region so that the rest of the world isn't suffering from a food shortage and so

forth. And of course, we don't seem to want an end to this war. We seem to want to continue it until, as Lloyd Austin said, we can weaken and isolate Russia, all very well. But what about Ukraine? Yeah, well, we're just fighting to the last man, as Lindsay Graham says. I had the quote here where until it comes down to hand-to-hand combat would be fine. It was long-range artillery is very, very important, but so is hand-to-hand insurgency that we are hoping to see in eastern Ukraine in the territory that's already been occupied by the Russians. And that was, I believe, Senator Blumenthal.

That said that. Yeah, well, I wonder how many... Yeah, Democrat, Richard Blumenthal. How many kids he has in the military or how much hand-to-hand combat he's done. Yeah, I wonder too. Listen, so this really is huge, the Chinese Peace Plan. Ukraine sees some merit in Chinese Peace Plan. reports Reuters. So do I have a correct, sir, that that just came out today, Friday?

Yes. It's not really a peace plan. It's a son of principles that could guide a mediation effort. Now the question is whether the Chinese had said they'll support mainly a European initiative to achieve peace in Ukraine between Ukraine and Russia. But it's not clear. that the Europeans will mount such an initiative. And we don't know to what extent the Chinese will risk their own reputations by getting in the middle of this mess in Eastern Europe. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, they have a lot to gain if they can help to strike a deal.

But, you know, the stakes are so high now. And with the Russians having officially annexed these four regions, that they don't necessarily control, these oblasts, they call them their provinces. And, of course, the Ukrainians have staked out the position thus far that the Russians must withdraw from every last inch of Ukrainian soil, including the Crimean Peninsula. So, on the other hand, I mean, leaving Crimea aside, because that just seems to me like they know they're bluffing with that.

But is it too obvious, sir, that if the Russians have annexed four terrorists, territories that they get to keep, too, and that that's the deal is, look, you guys are losing Maripal. The Donetsk and Lohansk are going to Russia, but Zeprosia and Kersons stay with Ukraine, as long as they're neutral, something like that. And I'm not trying to make the deal for them. I would prefer that America just not intervene at all, but let's not kid ourselves. This is America's proxy war in Ukraine. And, or I don't know, never even mind. In fact, you could divorce my question from whether that should be America's position at all, or just, whether this is the reality that they're going to essentially, I guess what I'm asking is,

does that seem like the reasonable middle ground that we're headed towards, or, no, too much? I think that you have to acknowledge that Ukraine has, in practice, been partitioned. And the only question now is, where is the border going to be between what remains of Ukraine and what is part of Russia or perhaps independent of both Russia and Ukraine. Everybody forgets that the Germans and the French sat down with the Ukrainians and the Russians and reached an agreement, two agreements, at Minsk in Belarus. And according to those agreements, the Donbos region, Donetsk and Lumpsk, were to be federalized, they were to be more, they were to have greater autonomy within Ukraine.

And the autonomy was basically linguistic, that they would be allowed to use the Russian language, which is their native language in those areas, to educate their children and to deal with their local government. The Ukrainian government in Kiev after the U.S. sponsored coup had immediately outlawed any use of Russia for these purposes, which is what sparked the rebellion in those regions. So there was a proposal for a federal structure that would have kept the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine within Ukraine, and everybody seemed to agree about that. Now we know from the Germans and the French, both, Madame Merkel and Mr. Hollande, who was then the prime, the president of France, that they weren't sincere. They were basically just buying time to reorganize the Ukrainian army to NATO standards and equip it with weapons to fight other Ukrainians in the east. I think, you know, one of the complexities here is that there are really three or four wars going on. One is between Ukrainians, Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians.

Ukrainian nationalists, ultra-nationalists, actually. Another is between Ukraine and Russia. Yet another is between the United States and Russia. And finally, many countries in NATO, through NATO, are also engaged in a war. with Russia. So untangling this is not easy. And the sad thing is we don't seem to have any intention to even try. Well, you know, so that's the important question. I keep bringing this up with everybody. I hope my audience isn't getting mad at my redundancy, but I definitely want to hear what you think about this. So they had this big Munich security conference.

And the slogan is, as long as it takes. And essentially, yeah, and from time to time, whatever it takes. And then, so the point is, um, in fact, there's this article by Kevin Barron in the industry rag defense news, you know, brought to you by Northrop Grumman. And he's obviously writing from a hawk's point of view. And he's saying how disappointing it is that they say whatever it takes, but they don't mean that. They clearly do not mean that. And if you pull them aside after they get off the stage, they'll tell you that they know or they fear if they really did what it took to help Ukraine win the war, that that would cause a real war between us and Russia. So they have to fall short of that.

And so instead, their brilliant plan is to just keep the war going at pretty much the pitch it is going for 10 years or whatever it takes until the Russians finally just leave exhausted, like at the end of the Afghan war in 1989. And so they don't want to negotiate. They don't want to defeat Russia either because they're terrified of getting nuke themselves. They don't want to get hurt. They want other people to get hurt, but that's different. And so, I don't know.

It just seems like it's pretty crazy the way that they, you know, characterize it themselves. And I wonder whether, I mean, do you think that that really represents the consensus that, I mean, and Michael Tracy, I'll add here, I interviewed Michael Tracy earlier today, and he was talking about, boy, is there nothing but total group think, you know, ironclad consensus among everybody about what they're doing here, no dissenting opinions about any of the or any of the frame of reference for any of it, you know? So I just wonder, you know, I don't know what my question was. How much danger are these cooks putting us in Chaucer Freeman?

I think that's the question. There's a lot of danger because the escalation has been continuous. There's no sign that it's going to stop. We keep saying we won't supply whatever, some tanks, before that it was long range. artillery. Now we're saying we won't supply F-16s or other aircraft. Each time we give in. So the escalation cycle is clear. I think it's actually going a bit far to call what is going on group think because that implies there is some thought. But nobody, when people say, we'll hang in there as long as it takes, they don't define what it is.

What is it? But what is our objective for Ukraine, for European security? You know, we're trying to humiliate Russia. We're trying to weaken it. We're trying to isolate it. But for most of the world, Russia is an important component of the emerging multipolar order, in which American power is offset by that of other great powers and in which gives smaller countries

and freedom for maneuver. Nobody wants outside the United States and Europe, possibly Japan. Nobody really wants Russia to be humiliated and weakened. What they want is peace in Ukraine. They want a restoration of access to the resources of both Russia and Ukraine, and they don't want a war in Europe,

still less World War III, which is what we're flirting with. All right, so I want to get back to World War III in a second, but first I want to go back to something that you said earlier, so I think I'm going to want to quote you on this, about Putin's attempt to negotiate in December of 21, November, December, 21, and January, February of 22. And how seriously you take that? Because the reaction, of course, at the time was,

that he's clearly, if you read the post in the Times version, he clearly is staking out such a radical position that that just proves that he doesn't mean it at all. He's just going through the motion, so he has an excuse for a war, right? Like Madeline Albright at Ramboyet or something. And that he couldn't possibly mean it because he's saying,

we got to pull all Western forces out of Eastern Europe, like Bill Clinton promised in ancient times in 1997, which doesn't count anymore from the Founding Act and, you know, I guess shut down the anti-missile missiles in Romania and Poland and all these things. And, of course, negotiate the open-door policy itself and whether we're going to let a foreign country like Russia tell us that we have to abandon our open door, which we've already opened and don't want to close and all of that. Well, we know how we react to similar efforts on the part of the Russians. There was a Cuban Missile Crisis in which we said Cuba had no right to accept Russian forces

on its territory, the capacity to attack us. But that's exactly what we were proposing for Ukraine, bringing Ukraine into NATO. There's earlier history. During our civil war, the French took advantage of the confusion. were in and installed Maximilian of Austria as the emperor of Mexico. The first thing we did after the end of the Civil War in 1865 was to mass U.S. troops on the Mexican border and say to the French, if you don't leave, we're coming after you. The French are not stupid and they left.

And poor Maximilian was eventually caught by Benito Quares, a great Mexican liberal figure and executed by firing squad. There are plenty of examples of in our own hemisphere of our refusing to accept the free choice of other countries to join alliances or structures that are hostile to us. So we should be able to understand the Russian perspective. I'll just add one other thing. That is, we have two great oceans on either side of us.

We have the Canadians who are insufferably polite, who are north. We have the Mexicans who we beat in the war and from whom we took the greater part of their territory, who are not a threat. But Russia is different. Russia, like Poland and Germany, sits on a great plane. There's nothing between Moscow and the Pyrenees to stop the cavalry or a tank battalion. from moving. There's nothing between Moscow and Kamsatka on the other side of the erasional mass to stop an invader. And so, indeed, Russia has been invaded by the Mongols, occupied by the Mongols. It's been invaded by the French. It's been invaded by the Germans.

And it's perfectly natural if you sit in Moscow and you don't have a physical barrier to invasion like an ocean to protect you, that you would be greatly concerned about the alignment and military orientation of your neighbors and about what kind of military equipment aimed at you is on their territory. So I think the Russians were completely serious in their desire to negotiate some understanding that would remove the obvious threat that bringing Ukraine fully into the U.S. sphere of influence in Europe called NATO, would pose to them. And of course, as I've said, and we all know, we reacted by saying, no way. Well, so his proposals and his peace trees of 2021, December 2021 and all that, you think he really was being serious. It's just that

he's so serious about these issues now. He wasn't willing to back down for anything. less than a capitulation that he must have known the Western side would not have given into. I don't think that's, I don't think he had any such appreciation of the Western side. And really, it's very difficult for me to understand what NATO or the United States gain by including the Ukraine. Obviously, the effort to include Ukraine and NATO has produced this war. I think the Russians are very seriously concerned about this, concerned enough to go to war.

And they began telling us, so as early as 1994, Boris Yelsen, before Putin was saying the same thing. Putin said in 2007 at Munich at the security conference that if the NATO expansion didn't stop, he was going to have to take action to stop it. And that is what he has done. And I think that was a terrible mistake on both our parts. We should have been willing to sit down and talk. Maybe we wouldn't have agreed with Putin's proposal. I'm sure we wouldn't.

Nobody enters a negotiation by presenting their fallback position. Right. But if you don't talk to them, you have no idea what they are prepared to accept. Right. I mean, that was really the question, right? made a terrible mistake. He didn't tell his generals. He was going to invade Ukraine.

He didn't line up the logistics for them. He didn't have a reasonable plan. He apparently inhaled his own propaganda and thought, like, some people said what happened when we invaded Iraq, that we'd be greeted, you know, the Russian forces would be greeted with flowers and dancing girls in. No way. So both sides made a terrible. terrible mistake, but it all could have been stopped. It could have been prevented if we had

been willing to sit down and talk seriously about how to alleviate each other's concerns. We weren't. Hey, guys, check out my new sponsor. It's Peacehawk Coffee at piecehawk. Coffee. First of all, business, you have to drink coffee in the morning, and you want it to taste good. Well, Peacehawk coffee is the best from around the world. But then, just as important, Peacehawk Coffee donates at least a dollar of every pound sold to worthy foreign aid organizations like Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation. When you buy Peacehawk Coffee, you're not only buying great coffee. You have a chance to support the economies of countries struggling against the effects of war

and support private aid foundations doing life-saving work abroad. Sign up for their email list and get yourself some great coffee at peacehawk.comfee. Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for the Libertarian Institute at Libertarian Institute.org. I'm the director. Then we've got Sheldon Richmond, Kyle Anzalone, Keith Knight, Lori Calhoun, Jim Bovard, Connor Freeman, Will Porter, Patrick Murpharlane, and Tommy Salman's on our staff, writing and podcasting. And we've also got a ton of other great writers, too, like Walter Block, Richard Booth, Boss Spliet, Kim Robinson, and William Van Wagonin. We've published eight books so far, including my latest, Hotter Than the Sun, Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and Keith, and Keith, Keith Knight's new Voluntarius Handbook, and we've got quite a few more great ones coming soon. Check out Libertarian Institute.org slash books.

It's a whole new era. We libertarians don't have the power, but we do have enough influence to try to lead the left and the right to make things right. Join us at libertarian institute.org. Right, and I guess it is a fact that the American side took the Russian proposal as a joke, right like oh you can't possibly expect us to live up to the founding act i mean that's crazy and that was the way they treated it as not never mind as you're saying not like they had to sign on the on the dotted line at the bottom but it was a reasonable basis to negotiate but the

americans never considered it one right there basically we rejected all discussion of a security structure in Europe that would reassure the Russians. And we actually put forward such a proposal earlier. I had something to do with it. And it was called the Partnership for Peace. It was an effort to manage European security in partnership with the Russians. Of course, that is not the way it worked out. Well, have you ever written a lot about that?

Because I'm actually writing a book about this right now. And I have a whole section on the PFP, but I don't have you in it. but it sounds like I need to. Well, we could talk on another, you know, offline. Great. Yeah, this all started after I'd conferred with our forces, General Charlie Katsvili and General Chuck Boyd, who was in Feing,

and Shalikershili was in Mons in Belgium, with our ambassador in Tuneo. And my question was, you know, in the post-code where you're, if Nader's the answer, what was the question? You know, why do we need this collective security system to defend against Russia when Russia's on the ropes and unlikely to come back at all in the same form if we play our card side? And anyway, we came up with a proposal which basically made a market in Europeanness. We said to the potential members of the Partnership for Peace Look, you want to get into NATO or you want to cooperate with NATO.

You have to do two things. First, you have to adopt Western standards of governance for your defense sector. You need to have parliamentary oversight of budgets. They need to be transparent. And you need a civilian as defense minister. That's the European democratic model. You want to be part of Europe, you've got to do that. And second, you have to learn how to contribute to the security of Europe,

not just consume the security services of others. If you're a poll, you need to be prepared to die for the defense of Portugal and vice versa, and you need to know how to do it. Well, NATO has 3,000 standardization agreements roughly. Stan eggs, they're called, which enable a Greek and a Turk, even though they'd hate each other, perhaps, and can't speak the same language to conduct a joint search and rescue mission. This is the operating doctrine for a multinational alliance. It's the only such body of doctrine in the world. The Warsaw Pact never achieved anything like it. It was basically the red iron. Army of the Soviet Union and then a bunch of Eastern European auxiliaries.

Anyway, this was the proposal. It would have created a cooperative security system in Europe. The U.S., a NATO-Russia council was part of it. And anyway, that was captured, I'm afraid, by domestic politics and lobbying by the naturally very Russophobic countries of Eastern Europe. They've had a bad experience of Russia. They didn't want to take a chance. The result of that, unfortunately, is that now there is a real danger

of the war in Ukraine spilling over into Poland, into Romania, and more broadly into Europe, and there is a real danger that this thing will go nuclear. All right, so let's get back to that. You mentioned World War III before, and this is the kind of thing that, you know, a thermonuclear explosion is so big that it just can't possibly be a real danger that any politician or general would really go so far or do such a thing. And it couldn't be that anyone who's a more serious gentleman than me

takes such a threat seriously. But for some reason you do, sir, so please explain. Well, I suggest you watch Dr. Strange Love because that is some of the reasoning that we have here. You know, I once asked the then General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, a question. I said, well, the United States is trying to develop ballistic missile defenses, which would mean that your deterrent, your nuclear deterrent might be neutralized. Are you going to build more nuclear weapons to deal with that? And I thought his answer was very intelligent.

He said, look, the only purpose of nuclear weapons is not to be used. Why would I spend one Chinese yen more on building stuff of which the purpose is not to be used? So no. Now, of course, we're in an arms race with China. China's heavying up its nuclear forces. Basically, to provide cover for a conventional military operation against Taiwan if they judge that to become necessary. So we are now engaged in front confrontations and potential exchanges of nuclear weapons with two great powers. I would also add that we have bungled our Korean policy to such an extent that maximum

pressure on North Korea has pushed North Korea into developing an effective nuclear ICBM force that can strike our homeland. I find it incredible that we're following exactly the same maximum pressure policy in our approach to Iran. And I know that the new very nationalist right-wing government of Mr. Netanyahu is fifth prime ministership in Israel. Israel is now talking very seriously about attacking Iran. And we have conducted at least three major exercises with the Israelis to perfect the means of doing that. We could end up in certain circumstances with not just a war with Russia, a war with China, North Korea taking advantage of the confusion to coast south and possibly nuking us.

And we could also, I think we're also going to end up eventually with Iran doing exactly what North Korea did, namely developing the capacity to strike our homeland with nuclear weapons. To say that this is stupid is to be too kind. Yeah. Well, none dare call it treason because it is just on this side of the stupid line from treason, right? Like, it really is. This is why empires dies. not that the Russians have infiltrated our government,

it's just that this is the best we can do is people like Anthony Blinken calling these shots. And I guess not, they don't perceive the danger that you're seeing it all. They're like, ah, come on, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, we can juggle that. Sure, and they also thought that there was no way Russia was going to invade Ukraine. And therefore, we could just blow them off.

That was a misjudgment. And I think, however, I think it's important for us to recognize that our problems, which are many, are of our own making. Nobody, no foreigner decided to ship our industry overseas. It was the management of our companies that decided that why did they do so? Because our tax laws, our labor management system and other things made it desirable to do that. that, from a financial point of view, you know, why do we have a gridlock in our politics? No foreigner did that to us. We did it to ourselves. And so I think it's very easy to blame other people for problems that are of your own making, and to a very considerable extent, that's what we're doing.

Yeah. All right. Now, so let me ask you about China. How likely, and I'm I'm sorry, because I think I asked you this before, but it's been more than a year or something I don't remember. How likely is it do you think that China will attack, invade, lay siege to Taiwan, and reincorporate it by force sometime in the next year, two or three or five or something? It depends on whether there's any prospect of a peaceful settlement of the issue. This is the legacy of the Chinese Civil War, in which we intervened after the outbreak of the Korean War. separating jang kai shek's forces who had retreated to taiwan from the victorious communist forces on the mainland and for 22 years we insisted that the legal government of china was jang kai shacks and it was in taibe not in beijing and we refused all contact with

bengen until leixen kisinger hofning we found a way to persuade the chinese that the taiwan issue was not urgent, but it could be set aside for peaceful resolution at a later date by agreeing to three terms that they put forward. One was that we ceased to recognize Jiang's government in Taipei as the government of all of China, recognized them, have no official relations with the authorities in Taiwan, and move our embassy from Taipei to Beijing, which we did. The second condition was that we would withdraw all military personnel installations from Taiwan and we would terminate our defense obligation to Taiwan, which was the treaty obligation. We did that.

And third, we agreed that we would not stand in the way of a peaceful settlement of that. of the issue. And so we are now in violation of all of these turners. There, we send our cabinet members to Taipei. The foreign minister from Taipei's just been visibly present in Washington. As an official guest, we have basically restored official relations. And we have what looks like an embassy in Taipei. we send senior congressional members in Nancy Pelosi

and maybe now Kevin McCarthy to Taipei as though they were a separate country. Rokana even went and he was one of the good guys on Yemen you might have thought that he was thoughtful about stuff like this at all, but I guess he's on the take. Well, I think he actually handled this pretty well from what I know. He told the Chinese ambassador, this is what I'm going to do.

I'm going to go to Beijing later, and I'm not going to question Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan. So he handled it, but I want to just say that we're also about to put troops in Taiwan. And so we're violating that. And, of course, the president has on four occasions pledged we would fight China to keep it from reinforce. with Taiwan. So we have a crisis. If the Chinese believe that there is no prospect of a peaceful resolution, this is something they care deeply about, the unity of their country, their sovereignty, their territorial integrity, and they will go to war. But I don't think they will do that until they are ready. They will have learned from the Russian mistake. The Russians went to war

in Ukraine without adequate preparation, no clear plan, and they have performed very badly. And the result is a war of attrition. The Chinese act, they will act suddenly and decisively and present us with a fait accompli. If we have troops on Taiwan, however, they will perform the role of a tripwire. They will get us into any China war that happens, whether we want to be in it or not. So there's a lot going on. It's pretty dangerous. Yeah.

What about the idea that the Chinese could just lay siege to Taiwan and surround it and just say, listen, we insist that you swear in our guys, your new leader, that's it, and we're not playing, and maybe without too many shots being fired, they could just coerce it somehow? Well, that's a theoretical possibility, but from the Chinese perspective, that would play to their weakness in the face of us, because that would give us time to organize ourselves and counter their action. So from their point of view, something sudden and decisive is vastly preferable. Even better than that, from their point of view, is no war at all. They would like their position consistently has been. they want to negotiate some kind of a settlement with Taiwan.

And they earlier proposed terms that were quite generous. They had proposed that Taiwan could keep its own armed forces and be responsible for depending its part of China. And when was this? That was in, I think, 1989. Okay. So, sorry, no, 1999. Of course, you know, we just didn't take any heat of that.

Well, they also said, you know, there will be no, unlike Hong Kong, there will be no Chinese troops assigned to Taiwan. There will be no civilian officers of the Chinese national government assigned to Taiwan, but Taiwan could send people to participate in the national government governing all of China. Those are pretty generous terms, I've got to say. It's hardly even sovereignty at all, if you're letting them keep. all their sovereignty, right? They're just changing their flag. It's basically a symbolic reunification.

Yeah. I'm afraid that may have been, that may not be on the table anymore. Oh, no, certainly not. Well, so now let me ask you, going back to Nixon and to Carter and the Shanghai communique and all these kinds of things where America, I guess you know all the words by heart, so where America says, we recognize that Taiwan is part of one China and that they will be reunited one day, I think, something like that, but we hope it'll be peaceful. And that's where we're implying that we might help Taiwan, but we might not. So China better not pick a fight, and Taiwan better not pick a fight by declaring independence either and kind of having it both

ways, sort of a status quo deal. But there is nothing in there. If I understand that right, that's part one and then part two, I guess, would be. But it lacks a thing saying, let's have talks and let's go ahead and get a move on on this peaceful reunification in order to avoid violent conflict, let's go ahead and do this. The Americans would rather have somebody to sell F-16s to, and the rest of this,

it sounds like. Well, I think our position on Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan is a little more nuanced, but that really is not the key point. Well, I got time, so please, you know, go ahead.

The key point is, that every time the Chinese have put forward some kind of proposal for peaceful resolution, we have up the ante with our support to Taiwan. So, in effect, we have emboldened Taiwan to reject the proposals from Beijing. And we have, everything we've done really has encouraged Taiwan to believe that it can achieve, it can ultimately achieve independence from the rest of China and that American soldiers, airmen, marines, and the Navy will be prepared to sacrifice our lives to achieve that. In other words, they're counting on us to enable them to become

independent. They want us to play the role that the French did in our own independence. But the problem with wars for independence or declarations of independence is that they require the consent of the government that you're trying to secede from. You know, the Confederacy tried to go its own way and the union government, Abraham Lincoln, did not agree. When we proclaimed our independence from the Brits in 1776, they did not agree. We had a seven-year combat and two years of tough negotiations to get them to agree. And there are plenty of peoples around the world, Palestinians, Kurds, Kashmiris, just to name a few,

who want self-determination and have been able to get it. So Taiwan is in a dilemma. On the one hand, it's a democracy, a very robust long, very admirable society in most respects. On the other hand, there's no outboard motor big enough to hook onto the island and drive it away from China. And there's no force in Taiwan that can stand up to a Chinese invasion. The only way Taiwan can challenge China is if it's backed by. the US and we are backing it and that is putting us directly in conflict with Chinese nationalism and challenging China to do something so this is not an intelligent policy we had an

arrangement that worked for 40 years where China basically said you know Taiwan's not urgent we don't need to do with it right now it can be dealt with later it was only when Taiwan and we began to depart from the framework being established that the Chinese began to not modernize their military to do reunification by force, which I think most war games now show they have the capacity to do it, although at humongous cost. Every war game that's fought results in a different outcome, of course,

but one element is always the same, And that is Taiwan's prosperity and democracy are destroyed. So basically we're taking the position in order to save it we have to risk it's being destroyed. We don't know if there is a war, how much damage we would do to the China mainland or how much damage they would do to our homeland. But we should be in no doubt that if we hit their homeland, they're going to hit back at odds. That is very exclusive in their military doctrine. So we are playing with a nuclear war, with a nuclear power, over what is and is not part of its territory.

And we're trying to project power 6,000 miles away across the Pacific. They're fighting on their own doorstep. The advantages are mostly with them. Final point is, of course, there's something that I call the balance of fervor. How fervent are you about the outcome? of a struggle. Well, North Vietnam seemed to care a great deal more about unifying Vietnam than we cared about keeping it divided.

And in the end, even though they were very weak, and there weren't many of them, they defeated us. And the balance of fervor in the Taiwan issue is not with us. It is with the Chinese. It suggests that we should be cautious about risking the war. that's interesting the balance of fervor um yeah of course it's the same kind of thing going on in ukraine as well you've got to understand how much more ukraine means to russia than it means to us but so again we're talking about messing with the power that's sitting on hundreds of icbms

tipped with h bombs that can at least you know destroy our military capacity and presumably many of our cities in a single day if it comes down to it and yet again we're talking about American military doctrine, just like in Europe, in the Pacific here, where it sounds like, you know, like Jeff Huber's book, Bathtub Admirals. Like, this is fun. We'll have, like, this cool thing.

We'll reenact World War II against Japan with the Great Sea Battles and all that. Wouldn't that be cool to do again? Like, we could have a big, great tank battle with Russia in East Europe, maybe, and that'd be great. A lot of guys would get extra stars

and bars on their, uniforms and things like that, and then they just kind of pretend that there are no H-bonds, and that we're not talking about H-bonds. Leave me alone about the H-bombs. We're not talking about that. We're talking about having a big fun tank war, a big fun sea battle that would be very thrilling for a lot of people who were born too late to be in World War II, I guess. Of course, war is not a video game.

Ask the Ukrainians what it's like. I know it. Yeah, they're getting blown to bits right now. But am I right, though, that there is kind of this cognitive dissonance where, obviously, if you bring up H-bombs, you ruin the whole conversation. You bring it to an early end when everybody's talking about what they could do about Taiwan, which is the real answer is nothing if you don't want to get nuked. Well, I think there's a lot of thoughtless reference to the Korean and Vietnam Wars, which were fought. Korea was fought directly with the Chinese after we appeared to threaten

MacArthur appeared to threaten to cross the hollow into China. We threatened China during that war with a nuclear attack. They didn't have nukes yet then, though. They did not. Well, that was the reason they developed them because at least I can document

three occasions in which we threatened to nuke them. They say they're six. I don't know whether they're right or wrong, but in any event it was that threat that caused them to go nuclear so there's a thought that

well you know that was a limited war was just over there and you know Vietnam was a limited war the Chinese were you know they had 300,000 troops in North Vietnam which no one wants to admit but that was a fact

but they weren't directly involved in the fight and so we could just do that again But that isn't what Taiwan is about. Taiwan is Chinese. It's culturally Chinese. It's historically Chinese. And if it wants to break away and not be Chinese, that's going to take a war.

And that war isn't going to be limited. It will be an all-out war. And anybody who thinks that a nuclear exchange with a country like China, even though it has far fewer nuclear weapons than we do, is going to leave us as a functioning society better think again so it's very convenient

as you say just to say well let's take nuclear weapons out of this video game and we don't have to worry about them because we have so many nuclear weapons they never dare to attack us but I think that's playing with nuclear fire look I got to admit

I didn't finish college and I'm just kind of a pirate radio skateboard and sort of a guy here, but it seems like the people in charge are very immature to me and that that's a big part of this is that they're not man enough to say, all right, all right, pipe down, chill out, we don't have to go so far all the time. You know what I mean? Well, you know, um, you know and I know that the way you get along with neighbors or people who are not immediate neighbors, but you have to deal with, is not by starting every conversation by pulling a gun or giving them the finger. You have to sit down and talk to people and you have to understand where they're coming from if you want to persuade them to do

what you think is right. That's called diplomacy, actually. I don't see it happening in our system at the moment. All right, you guys, that is Chos Freeman. His website is choss Freeman.net. And, oh, it looks like your latest book here is America's continuing misadventures in the Middle East. Sounds right. Thank you very much for your time, Chas.

Appreciate it. Nice to be back with you. The Scott Horton Show and Anti-War Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. psradyo.com, antiwar.com, scothorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.