Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/26/22 Scott’s Recent Speech on the History Behind the Russia-Ukraine Crisis

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Scott gave a comprehensive speech on the story behind the Russia-Ukraine crisis to the Libertarian Party of Utah and Mises Caucus in Salt Lake City, Utah. 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

Yeah, it is my honor and distinct privilege to introduce Scott Orton. So, get one. Yeah. Woo! Woo! Thank you, you guys. Thank you, Reed. Appreciate that, buddy.

All right, thank you all for coming out. I really appreciate it. I hope you already went to the bathroom. I'm just going to take a while. So, yeah, I guess I'll get started. All this war is making my hair fall out. That was the joke. Tom Woods says, always start with a joke.

I hope you liked it. Okay, now my disclaimer, I am the director of the Libertarian Institute, and I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com, but they are both 501C3 nonprofit organizations and have nothing to do with my appearance here with you today. Thank you. Okay. And now, just to get this out of the way real quick,

whenever someone dares to differ with the common government and TV narrative about Russia and their role in the world, that person is usually instantly condemned as spouting Russian talking points or being paid by Putin. This is probably especially the case this week as Russia is waging aggressive invasion

against their neighbor, Ukraine, as we speak. That's still nonsense. Where would a Texan obtain these talking points? Are they true? Back in the days of the Communist Soviet Union, there were some Americans, many fewer than supposed, and no true danger. But still, there were some Americans

who shared an ideological affinity and loyalty to communism and the Soviet government. But there just is nothing whatsoever comparable to that today in the United States. A cult of Putin? Where? Certainly not in either major party, nor within liberalism,

progressivism, socialism, socialism, conservatism, populism, libertarianism, or any other broad-based political movement in America. Putin is no charismatic communist leader of the fourth international. He's a center-right Republican, essentially, tied closely

to certain business oligarchs. His flag is red, white, and blue, his religion is Christian. We've already got all of that. Why would we need a cult of a foreign power or leader to find some conservatives to worship? And he speaks quietly. There's not one single faction of any significance or maybe at all anywhere in this country that favors Russia or puts Russian interests first. It just doesn't exist. The people who claim that do so in order to avoid having to deal with the other side of the story at all. Or they're just dumb.

And so why would we contradict the common narrative? Because our government lies, and the truth is important. Twenty years ago, began the push to lie us into war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The most important aspect of it was a way they tried to controversialize critical thinking. those who contradicted the received wisdom were accused of being objectively pro-Saddam and his government

but the critics were 100% right and the war party was lying the whole time the lesson should have been that we will never let our government and media do that to us ever again but it keeps happening as Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University

and leader of the so-called realist school of foreign policy wrote earlier this week, quote, strategic empathy isn't about agreeing with an adversary's position. It's about understanding it so that you can fashion an appropriate response. End quote. Now, last Tuesday, the 22nd, Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the supposed independence of the two breakaway provinces in far eastern Ukraine. Donetsk and Luhansk, and then sent so-called peacekeeping forces into that area. On Wednesday, Russia launched a massive invasion of the rest of Ukraine.

As of this morning, it is not clear if they intend to conquer all of the land east of the Nipur River, possibly all the way to Odessa, or all of Ukraine, including the city of Leviv and the far west, in all the land to the borders of Romania and Poland. There's some indication Putin means to pull back after the initial assault to the Donbass. We just don't know yet, exactly. But in his speech last Monday, Putin's arguments about the dangers of Ukraine's independence

went far enough to justify taking over the entire country permanently. To be perfectly clear, I condemn all of this. Even considering what I'm about to tell you about the U.S. government's role in precipitating this conflict and taking into account Putin's legitimate concerns about the Donbass region, I think absorbing the Donbass in this way, much less conquering the rest of the country, was totally unnecessary and could end up leading to a wider war in Europe and worse reactions from nations all around. I think it was not just unconscionable but completely unreasonable.

I have a Twitter friend whose sister's life is in danger from the war right now. But the American hawks say this is all happening because Russian President Vladimir Putin is a megalomaniacal dictator bent on imperial expansion and becoming the next great Russian czar. No. It was unreasonable, but it was rational. A reaction. understandable, not in the sympathetic sense, but strictly in the literal one. The responsibility for the invasion of Ukraine by Russia belongs to Vladimir Putin, but the new Cold War it takes place within is primarily the responsibility of the U.S. government

and its leaders over the last 30 years. And when I say 30 years, I mean it. Just this last Christmas day was the 30th. 30th anniversary of the last day of the USSR. The communist red flag came down, the red, white, and blue Russian standard went up in its place. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was over. The evil empire was dead. But then the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump,

and Joe Biden ruined our great peace and victory at the end of the last Cold War. Instead, they got us into this mess. This was primarily due to the policies of NATO expansion, tearing up important nuclear treaties, the installation of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, overthrowing multiple governments friendly to Russia, including Ukraine twice in 10 years, and spending the last five years sending sophisticated arms to Ukraine. They were warned. They thought it would be fine.

It wasn't. The George Bush senior years. President Ronald Reagan had negotiated an end to the Cold War with the old Soviet Union. But then, under President H.W. Bush, the American foreign policy community, led by the neoconservatives, adopted a doctrine of global dominance. This was, as Charles Crouthammer put it in foreign affairs in 1990, the U.S.'s so-called unipolar moment, an opportunity to remake the world our way and keep it that way. They call it leadership, hegemony, preeminence, predominance, or even full-spectrum dominance. It's world empire.

No, really, it's all for their own good, though, keeping the peace, protecting the sea lanes, enforcing the global, rules-based, liberal international order. Dick Cheney's Defense Departments post-Iraq War I defense planning guidance from 1992 defined the doctrine for the new decade and into the new millennium. The U.S. must remain the single dominant power on the planet and must maintain enough military power to prevent any possible strategic rivals such as Germany, Japan, Russia, or China, from even considering an attempt to challenge U.S. power. as those same neoconservatives wrote in their 1998 project for a new American century study rebuilding America's defenses,

expanding the U.S. presence in the Middle East, and the NATO alliance in Europe was at the core of their doctrine. But there was a problem. On February 9, 1990, President George H.W. Bush and his secretary of state James Baker promised Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that if the U.S. would withdraw their troops and allow German reunification under America's NATO military alliance, they would not expand it, as Baker put it, quote, one inch eastward, end quote, beyond that. West German Chancellor Helmut Cole, French President Francois Mitterrand, British Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher, and later John Major, all made the same promise. Of course, they've lied about it ever since. at various times claiming this pledge either never happened at all or doesn't count because it wasn't in writing.

But in 2019, the records were posted at George Washington University's National Security Archive. You can read the writing yourself. An American researcher just last week found in the British National Archives, a formerly secret document, minutes of a meeting with the political directors of the foreign ministries of America, the UK, France, and Germany on March 6th. in which the German representative, Juergen Chobag, says, quote, we made it clear in the two plus four negotiations that we would not expand NATO beyond the Elb. We can therefore not offer NATO membership to Poland and the others, end quote. As reported by the German paper Der Spiegel, U.S. Representative Raymond Sites said,

quote, we have made it clear to the Soviet Union in the two plus four talks and elsewhere that we will not take advantage of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe. A somewhat embarrassing but important related point. Did you guys know that President George Bush Sr. actually tried to save the Soviet Union? It's true. He and his Secretary of State, James Baker III, and National Security Advisor General Brent Skokroft, thought it would be preferable if Moscow could retain control of the former Soviet republics, the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine.

The second to last American ambassador to the USSR, Jack Matlock, has explained this history to me himself. Some of you may remember or have heard of H.W. Bush's so-called Chicken Kiev speech of August 1991, as New York Times writer William Sapphire called it. It turns out the speech was written for Bush Sr. by Condoleezer Rice. Later, famously, his son's national security advisor and secretary of state. In this speech, Bush warned against Ukrainian agitation for independence from Russia

on anything but the Kremlin's deliberate timetable, telling their central committee, quote, freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based on ethnic hatred, end quote. Though he was probably rightly mocked for trying to hold the USSR together in a new loose confederation rather than favoring its outright destruction, first, his caution helped the Russian reformers see it through to the end without the U.S. provoking unnecessary backlash against it.

And secondly, this did show his recognition of potentially dangerous nationalist forces in Ukraine who could do themselves much more harm than good. Though Bush launched America's so-called New World Order of attempted global hegemony and our 30-year-long catastrophic war in the Middle East, it should be mentioned that President H.W. Bush, in one important way, handled the end the Cold War in what you could even say was heroic fashion by signing multiple treaties with the Soviets and then the successor Russian state to reduce both sides' stockpiles of nuclear weapons from the tens of thousands down to much lower totals of today, including

up until the very last days of his presidency. So at least he's got that going for him. But the trouble really started with Bill Clinton. He started expanding NATO in his second term. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were brought in in 1999. Clinton and his advisor said that Russia wouldn't mind. Maybe they'll join. They created the NATO-Russia council with a promise toward further integration. Then the Kosovo War of 1999 ended all that talk for good. Of course, inviting Russia into NATO, creating essentially a one-world white army of the north, would have also been a disaster. But the alternative, our government has chosen, has been at least as bad.

Many Cold War Hawks, such as H.W. Bush's best friend and National Security Advisor General Brent Skowcroft, Clinton's Secretary of Defense, William Perry, George Kennan, who had coined the containment policy back in the 1940s, and his rival, Paul Nitsa, who had favored the much more aggressive

policy of Soviet rollback, Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during most of the war in Vietnam. Former CIA directors Admiral Stansfield Turner and Robert Gates, Ambassador Jack Matlock, Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan, John Warner, Sam Nunn, and Bill Bradley, anti-communist academics like Richard Pipes and Edward Lutwack, and dozens more of the highest ranking active and retired generals, admirals, and Foreign Service officers, all warned Clinton not to go through with it. in an open letter signed by President Eisenhower's granddaughter, Susan, and 50 of these important policy establishment, foreign policy establishment leaders, they warned in part, quote, the current U.S.-led effort to expand NATO is a policy error of historic proportions.

We believe that NATO expansion will decrease Allied security and unsettle European stability for the following reasons. In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the non-democratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement, and galvanize resistance in the Duma to the start two treaty, two and three treaties. In Europe, NATO expansion will draw a new line of division between the end of the end of the end of the war.

ins and the outs, foster instability, and ultimately diminish the sense of security of those countries which are not included. In NATO expansion, which the alliance has indicated is open-ended, will inevitably degrade NATO's ability to carry out its primary mission and will involve U.S. security guarantees to countries with serious border and national minority problems, and unevenly developed systems of democratic government, end quote. But Jeffrey Epstein's close friend Bill Clinton had said they would, quote, build and secure a new Europe, peaceful, democratic, and undivided at last. But he wasn't uniting Europe. He was redividing it. Ambassador Matlock warned that if you exclude Russia from the expanded alliance, it would necessarily,

be against them. Here, the Cold War had already been over for two years before the final end of the USSR, and the USA was already on the path to restarting it again. Kennan wrote in the New York Times in 1997, quote, Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalization anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion, to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy, to restore the atmosphere of Cold War to East-West relations,

and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. End quote. Ken and complained to the Times Thomas L. Friedman in 1998, Quote, I think NATO expansion is the beginning of a new Cold War. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely, and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.

This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. Don't people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet communist regime, and now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then the NATO expanders will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are, but this is just wrong. End quote. His prediction is our present. Joe Biden claimed Thursday that Russia's recent actions have nothing to do with NATO expansion. that this is merely a thin excuse in vote by Vladimir Putin's government. Well, in 2016, Bill Clinton's former Secretary of Defense, William Perry, admitted that, quote, in the last few years most of the blame can be pointed at the actions Putin has taken. But in the early years, I have to say that the United States deserves much of the blame.

Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand. bringing in Eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. Quote, at that time, we were working closely with Russia, and they were beginning to get used to the idea, oh, pardon me, that's a continuing quote about, mind my bad. At that time, we were working closely with Russia, and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy. But they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border, and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.

It wasn't that we listened to their argument and said we don't agree with that argument. Basically, the people I was arguing with when I tried to put the Russian point of view out there, the response that I got was really, who cares what they think? They're a third-rate power. And, of course, that point of view

got across to the Russians as well. That was when we started sliding down that path. End quote. Secretary Perry almost resigned over NATO expansion back then. He also, in the interview, blamed the U.S. for provocative missile defense

systems in Europe and the color-coded revolutions in Russia's near abroad for poisoning relations with Putin's Russia. In fact, he said Putin was sure the U.S. was plotting to overthrow him too. Something which Perry did not seem to think was too far-fetched himself. Quote, after he came to office,

Putin came to believe that the United States had an active and robust program to overthrow his regime. And from that point on, a switch went on in Putin's mind that said, I'm no longer going to work with the West. I don't know the facts behind Putin's belief that we actually had a program to foment revolution in Russia, but what counts is he believed it. Are you familiar with the current CIA director, William Burns? In 2008, he was ambassador to Russia. In January of that year, he met with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov,

and then wrote a memo for the boss back home entitled, Nyet means Nyet. Julian Assange sacrificed his liberty to the darkest dungeons of the empire to bring us this information. In the memo, Burns wrote, Quote, during his annual review of Russia's foreign policy, January 22nd through 23rd, Foreign Minister Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.

While Russia might believe statements from the West that NATO was not directed against Russia, when one looked at recent military activities in NATO countries, establishment of U.S. forward operating locations, etc., they had to be evaluated not by stated intentions, but by potential. Lavrov stressed that maintaining Russia's sphere of influence in the neighborhood was anachronistic and acknowledged that the U.S. and Europe had, quote, legitimate interests in the region. But, he argued, while countries were free to make their own decisions about their security and which political military structures to join, they needed to keep in mind the impact on their neighbors.

Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences, which would severely affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine

over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split involving violence, or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide

whether to intervene, a decision Russia does not want to have to face. end quote. Burns further elaborated in his memoir, the back channel, that he had noted as far back as 1995 that, quote, hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the political spectrum here, end quote. In another memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2008, he wrote that, quote, Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite. not just Putin. In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin's sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine and NATO as anything other than a direct

challenge to Russian interests. End quote. He also wrote to Rice that it would be, quote, hard to overstate the strategic consequences, end quote, of bringing Ukraine into NATO, and warned, quote, it will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, end quote. Over and over, we see not just the guys at anti-war.com and the Cato Institute, but many of the grayest and wisest of all the gray beards at the Council on Foreign Relations in academia,

the state and defense departments warned back in the 1990s in the strongest language available what was likely to happen. Someone would prefer, we forget all that, and simply presume, as TV does, that history began this morning, and none of this matters. But that would be foolish, because it does matter, obviously very much. On top of the insult and danger of Western incorporation of former Warsaw-packed states into the NATO alliance was the so-called shock therapy economic policy of the Harvard Boys, Larry Summers, Jeffrey Sachs, David Lipton, and Robert Rubin, which totally destroyed the Russian economy.

Instead of being a good sport at the end of a world historical peaceful victory, the U.S. under Bill Clinton just kept kicking them while they were down. All at once, these so-called Harvard boys abolished all subsidies and price controls in the formerly completely communist economy, induced hyperinflation, destroying all available capital for real investment, and used voucher and loans for share schemes that handed over entire industries to connected gangsters and oligarchs. The consequence for the economy and civilian, population were beyond severe. They were devastated. Life expectancy fell by double digits across the country. Just imagine the fall of a communist country and life expectancy falls by

double digits across the board when they abandoned Marxism because of American intervention and setting them straight. The September 1999 congressional testimony A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Anne Williamson, explains the full scale of the tragedy and how they got away with it. I just interviewed her about it last week, in fact. The U.S. also rigged the Russian presidential election of 1996 with billions of dollars in last-minute loans for passing out bribes and a massive and sophisticated propaganda and ballot box stuffing campaign to secure the corrupt Boris Yeltsin's re-election. Is that ancient? history? Bill Clinton launched two interventions in the Balkans against the Russian-Aliad Serbs.

The New World Order died in 1999 when Bill Clinton decided to launch his victory lap Kosovo war after his acquittal on his impeachment charges in the U.S. Senate, in which he sided with the bin Ladenite-tied Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, against Serbia, to break off the province of ethnic Albanian dominated Kosovo. Clinton bypassed the UN Security Council, where Russia had inherited the USSR seat and veto power, and waged the war on his own and NATO's authority. This humiliated Yeltsin and severely set back

U.S.-Russian relations. It also set a precedent that is being invoked by the Russians this week, where an ethnic minority is claiming persecution. A great power can move right in and change their sovereign status with unilateral force, the so-called international law be damned. During the Kosovo War, the famous British singer James Blunt, then a colonel in the British Army, allied with his superior, General Michael Jackson, seriously, to warn NATO commander General Wesley Clark's command,

pardon, oh, pardon me, to thwart NATO commander, General Wesley Clark's command to attack the Russians when they seize the airport at Pristina, Serbia, during the war. Quote, I'm not going to start World War III for you, end quote, Jackson is reported to have told Clark. Clinton's CIA, in alliance with Saudi Arabia, also supported the separatist Mujahideen fighters in Chechnya,

against the Russians in the late 1990s. At the same time that they supported Russian efforts against the Chechens, as detailed by the Washington Post, the Stratfor emails at WikiLeaks, and the journalism of former FBI lawyer, Colleen Rowley. These schemes, of course, contributed to the rise of Vladimir Putin, who ran the Chechen wars and was named Prime Minister

by Yeltsin in 1999. Yeltsin then resigned and named Putin to replace him as president, on New Year's Eve of the year 2000. Putin has since isolated, exiled, and replaced America and Israel's favored Russian oligarchs with his own. In his statement announcing the de facto absorption of the Dombas this last Monday, Putin mentioned this U.S. support for the Chechen Mujahideen as an example of how unfairly the West has treated Russia over these last few decades. He also referred to stories about jihadists from the Syrian, from the dirty war in Syria, linking up with neo-Nazis to fight against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine in the Obama years.

That's true, too. You can read all about it at the intercept. The George W. Bush years. Vladimir Putin was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush on September 11, 2001, to offer his condolences and full cooperation, including the use of Russia's northern route in Afghanistan through Kazakh and Uzbek airspace and the use of former Soviet bases in those countries. Putin is said to have spent considerable political capital facing down critics on his right in Russian politics and the media and military to do so. Bush turned right around three months later and announced American withdrawal,

from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and plans to put defensive missiles in Poland and radars in the Czech Republic. Attempting to avoid the obvious, the President claimed these were to protect Poland from ballistic missile attack from Iran. When Bush said this at a NATO or G8 meeting, I'm sorry I couldn't find it, but I swear I do remember this. The others all busted out laughing in spite of themselves. Instead, these missiles dangerously tipped the balance of mutually assured destruction toward one of potential first-strike capability. This, of course, is considered a major threat by Russia. Bush's government also launched a project of what are called the color-coded revolutions primarily against Russian-leaning states and there near abroad.

These are essentially U.S. coup d'etaz, disguised as a war-coded. as fake revolutions, backed by the CIA National Endowment for Democracy, NED, and friendly, supposedly private NGOs like Aupor. This trend started in the Bill Clinton years with mixed success in Albania in 1996, Montenegro and Croatia in 1997, Slovakia and Armenia in 1998, and Serbia in 2000.

Bush brought the successful Serbian template to Georgia with the Rose Revolution, in 2003, the orange revolution in Ukraine in 2004, the failed denim revolution in Belarus in 2005, the short-lived tulip revolution in Tajikistan in 2005, the failed cedar revolution in Lebanon in 2005, and the disastrous green revolution in Iran during Obama's presidency in 2009. In the 2004 orange revolution in Ukraine, the U.S. helped to overthrow the elected president Viktor Yanukovych from the Russian-leaning party of regions in favor of the western-leaning Yushenko and his allies, sorry I left off his first name

there, I forgot it, and his allies such as the so-called gas princess, Yulia Timenshenko. The Bush government also continued further NATO expansion into Eastern Europe in violation of his father's promise, bringing seven more countries into the alliance. The former Warsaw Pact nations of Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, and the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all actual former Soviet so-called republics, the former two of which share a direct border with Russia. In 2008, Bush announced America's intention to include Ukraine and Georgia in the alliance, but thus far Germany and France and circumstance. have refused to allow it. NATO membership is a war guarantee. The people in charge act as though it's just an invite to a fancy cocktail party

for power international government socialites. Instead, it is a mutual defense pact. President Bush Sr.'s right-hand man and former national security advisor, Brent Skokroft, opposed NATO expansion in the 1990s. He later explained that one radio... One major reason for it was that the Americans wanted to see Eastern Europe integrated with the West. Though he believed the European Union was the best vehicle for this, he said the French and the Germans were more reluctant.

So the U.S. instead, in part, chose to expand the NATO military alliance just to hurry along the process of Eastern Nations integration into the European common market. What could go wrong? Well, as Pat Buchanan, a former ardent cold warrior in the bad old days, likes to point out, the U.S. used to draw the line at the Elbe River halfway across Germany. The threat was that if the Soviets invaded West Germany, threatening France, Belgium, Denmark, and the other Western democracies, we would go to war to stop them. Now, America has moved that line, 1,200 miles to the east, to Russia's very western border with the Baltic states.

There's no real reason to fear it, but if Russia did decide to reconquer Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania, our politicians have signed us up to fight a war to defend them from a power that could, in fact, destroy our entire civilization permanently in a single act. afternoon. It came down to it. The short Georgia War of August 2008 could have turned into a real war. George's president, Mikhail Shakashvili, victor of the U.S.-backed Rose Revolution of 2003, was incentivized to take bigger risks due to the Bucharest Declaration of America's intent to bring them into the NATO alliance just four months before. The U.S. military U.S. military support and vague security assurances the Bush government had given his government that spring also contributed to his overconfidence. Shokashvili launched an attack on the breakaway province of South Ossetia in the southern Caucasus mountains,

then enjoying full autonomy and protection by Russian peacekeepers under a deal that had been brokered by our European Union allies. The Russians, suffering casualties in the initial assault, quickly struck back, destroying Georgia's invading force and securing South Ossetia's independence from Georgian rule. Vice President Cheney reportedly proposed missile strikes against the Russian troops coming through the Roki Tunnel under the Caucasus Mountains. Luckily, the much w. Bush had decided better than to listen to Dick Cheney by the that point. Imagine Georgia, this tiny weak nation in the Southern Caucasus Mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas being included in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. You thought

Turkey was pushing it. But what value could Georgia possibly add to the American Alliance other than to get the people of this country into the worst kind of trouble over issues that are absolutely none of our business. Putin gave a speech to a NATO meeting in Bucharest in April 2008, the NATO meeting, in Bucharest in April 2008, telling the Western leaders that, quote, the claim that this process of bringing as many of Russia's neighbors into the West's military alliance as possible is not directed against Russia will not suffice. National security is not based upon promises. end quote.

Fiona Hill, a Russian expert at the Brookings Institution, who made herself famous during Trump's first impeachment, told the New York Times that the intelligence agencies recommended against declaring a path to membership by Ukraine and Georgia because so many of our NATO allies opposed it. But W. Bush went ahead anyway. As Putin elaborated in an interview with Oliver Stone, whether America's motives are truly just centered around corporate welfare or not.

The position the U.S. is putting him in requires him to respond to the heightened threat and target our anti-ballistic missile stations in Poland and Romania. Soon thereafter, in March 2018, Putin claimed in his annual address to the Duma that the Russian military has developed an entire new generation of nuclear weapons. These include new heavy Merv, that is, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle missiles, which are designed to travel around the South Pole, approaching from a direction where we have no defense and is armed with enough warheads that just one missile could kill every major city in Texas. Putin also boasted of new nuclear-powered cruise missiles with essentially unlimited range,

evading U.S. defenses, virtually undetectable nuclear torpedoes for destroying American coastal cities and major ports, and hypersonic delivery vehicles that travel at speeds above Mach 5, which completely skew the balance of mutually assured destruction by reducing the amount of time that policymakers have to decide whether to go to nuclear war from 15 or 30 minutes to perhaps less than 5. The primacy project did not create a permanent state of dominance and security. Instead, we got endless new liabilities with nothing real to show for it and a new nuclear arms race, which it looks like we're losing badly.

The Obama years. The Democrats especially attack Russia, but perhaps they should take responsibility. President Barack Obama continued down the same destructive path as his predecessors. First of all, his administration continued NATO expansion by adding the Balkan states, Albania, and Croatia to the alliance. He and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, after making such a big deal about their attempted so-called reset with Russia, then turned right around and made a chump out of the new Russian president, Dmitri Mie Vedev, by lying him into supporting the 2011 Libya war resolution in the UN Security Council. Obama's government claimed they were only going to launch a no-fly zone

to protect civilians in Benghazi in Libya's east against the pretended threat that Gaddafi meant to slaughter the entire civilian population there, which was a ridiculous hoax. They then used the resolution as cover to launch a nine-month-long regime-change war on behalf of the Libyan veterans of Iraq War II, those who had fought for al-Qaeda in Iraq there, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and Ansar al-Sharia, who have helped turn that country into a free-fire zone in the decades since.

This discredited the apparently gullible pushover Miedvedev and led to Putin's early return to the presidency. Putin accused the Obama administration of bankrolling dissenters protesting the Russian parliamentary elections of 2011. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton certainly did denounce the elections as unfair, and the State Department admitted to the media that they and allied non-governmental organizations did spend money promoting the democratic process, but swear that none of their activities favored any group.

Yet Putin still helped Obama avoid full-scale war against Assad's government in Syria in 2013 by negotiating the destruction of all of their chemical weapons stocks. And he also helped pressure the Ayatollah Khamenei to support Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's efforts to negotiate the nuclear deal of 2015 with the U.S. and U.N. Security Council powers. If you know nothing, you'll fall for anything. And even libertarians, oftentimes blind to history and context, sometimes see these problems through TV and John McCain. eyes. For example, during the crisis in Ukraine in 2014, when democratically elected Russian

leaning, pardon me, when the democratically elected Russian leaning government was overthrown in a violent U.S.-backed street push, the most blatant coup in history, according to Stratford's George Friedman, which was led by neo-Nazis from the Wright Fector and Svoboda Party, and American-picked puppets were installed in its place. The Russians reacted by seizing the Crimean Peninsula and supporting ethnic Russian separatists when war broke out in the far-eastern Donbass region bordering Russia. Freedom is being threatened by Russian aggression,

the narrative went, which could not have been further from the truth. It was a battle over spheres of influence. Theirs is inside their own borders only. And even then, only for the time being. Ours is the entire sphere. As National Endowment for Democracy Head Karl Gershman threatened in the Washington Post in September of 2013, just as the U.S.-backed Ukrainian Maidan movement was getting started, quote, Russians too face a choice,

and Putin may find himself on the losing end, not just in the near abroad, but within Russia. in Russia itself." Now, it is certain that the very worst things that Russia has done in this century has been their involvement in the wars in Ukraine and Syria. But it is important to note that, first of all, in both cases, the U.S. started it, not Russia. In Ukraine, Putin sent denial-special operations types into eastern Donbass region to help defend it in 2014.

Like that or not, up until this week, for eight years they did not invade the country with any conventional force or take territory in the East. When the Donbass region held a referendum and voted to ask to join the Russian Federation in February 2015, Putin refused. He would only help them to maintain their autonomy from the hostile regime in Kiev. More than 14,000 people were killed in the 2014-15 war there and in the low-level fighting, which has continued between then and now. But the vast majority, approximately 80 percent of these, were Ukrainian civilians and militia fighters

killed by the Kiev government, not pro-regime Ukrainians killed by separatists or Russian invaders. Never mind the truth. The narrative is what counts on TV. Except in this case, there's hardly even a narrative at all, just the endlessly repeated slogans, Russian aggression, and Russian seizure of Crimea, without any explanation or context. Well, here is some context on the subject of Putin's annexation of Crimea in 2014. Russia won the Crimean Peninsula away from the Turks back in 1783, the same year that Benjamin Franklin and John Adams negotiated America's peace with Great Britain after the Revolutionary War,

four years before our Constitution had even been written. It is part of Russia, like New York is part of the USA. Think about how important West Point is to New Yorkers, or the Alamo is to Texans. The Russians lost more than 200,000 soldiers fighting to keep Crimea out of the hands of the Germans and Romanians in World War II. Plus, it's their only year-round warm water port and home of their Black Sea fleet. You could see why they consider it important.

Try to take San Diego from the USA and see what happens. The only reason Crimea was under Ukrainian control at all was because Soviet first secretary and premier Nikita Khrushchev gave it to them by decree in 1954 in order to shore up Ukrainian support for his rise to power after the death of dictator Joseph Stalin. At that point, it made no difference since they were all answerable to the Kremlin first anyway. The population in Crimea is something like 60% Russian, 15% Turkic Tatars, and 25% Ukrainian. In the generation between the fall of the Soviet Union and the events of the last decade,

Crimea had maintained a great deal of autonomy from the central government in China. Kiev. But after the 2014 coup, three former Ukrainian president signed a letter demanding that Russia be expelled from the naval base at Sevastopol, where they had maintained a naval presence on lease after the end of the Cold War. Instead, Putin ordered his men to leave their bases and take control of the peninsula. Reportedly, six people were killed in total. It is not clear how many, if any, were actually shot by Russia. Marines or sailors, pardon me. A referendum

was quickly held, and better than a super majority of the people of the Crimean Peninsula voted to join the Russian Federation. Later independent polling confirmed these results. That is too bad for the minority who did not want to change allegiance,

but these are nation states, not libertarian theorists, and supermajority votes like that are as close as humanity can get to full consensus on such large questions involving sovereignty over so many people. Putin later joked in a speech by way of explanation for a seizure of the Crimean Peninsula, quote, let me say that we are not opposed to cooperation with NATO, for this is certainly not the case.

For all the internal processes within the organization, NATO remains a military alliance. And we are against having a military alliance making itself at home, right in our backyard or in our historic territory. I simply cannot imagine that we would travel to Sevastopol to visit NATO sailors. Of course, most of them are wonderful guys, but it would be better to have them come and visit us, be our guests, rather than the other way around. And quote. President Obama himself told CNN's Fareed Zachariah, quote,

quote, Mr. Putin made this decision around Crimea and Ukraine, not because of some grand strategy, but essentially because he was caught off balance by the protests in the Maidan and Yanukovych then fleeing after we had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine, end quote. Again, when the eastern Dombas region originally tried to join Russia back in February 2015, Putin said no. The U.S. and its clients were threatening Russia's vital interests in the warm water naval port at Sevastopol in the Black Sea. That's the only reason he moved there.

The status quo had held for 23 years since the red flag came down, despite majority support there for rejoining Russia. instead of remaining with Ukraine. The Kremlin had been happy to lease the port and otherwise stay out. It was the U.S. that forced the change in the situation, and it blew up in their face. Never mind our Monroe Doctrine in the sense that the Russians must feel the same way about their near abroad as Americans do, but the doctrine itself actually promises to stay out of European affairs, if they will stay out of our hemisphere in return.

One hundred and ninety-nine years ago, President James Monroe promised in his seventh annual message of December 2, 1823, that in return for the European powers, staying out of the Americas, quote, our policy in regard to Europe will remain not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers, to consider the government de facto,

as the legitimate government for us, and to cultivate friendly relations with it." End quote. That part always goes unmentioned, doesn't it? Now imagine if the shoe was on the other foot in, say, Canada. What if the Russians, after having won the Cold War, had begun incorporating all of Latin America into their Warsaw Pact military alliance, and then even used neo-Nazis to do a street put against the government in Ottawa, overthrowing it, threatening to kick the United States out of its naval bases in Alaska, and then helped the new regime launch a war against the people of Vancouver, BC, for refusing to recognize the new coup junta, and all

while threatening to overthrow the government in Washington, D.C. next. Right. The U.S. would invade Canada, and probably nuke Moscow. Those crazy liberty-hating Russians, though, especially that Vladimir Putin, the supposedly most dangerous freedom-hating psychopath on the planet, well, they'll just have to learn to get used to it. The Americans act as though there is nothing he could ever or would ever do about it. Speaking of which, I highly recommend you all look up and check out the clip of Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose on the old Stephen Colbert show.

ragging about the Kiev coup two days before and how easy it was and how we're stealing this important strategic asset away from Russia while Putin is distracted with the Sochi Olympics so that he can't do anything about it. Rose explains that Ukraine is formerly part of the old Soviet bloc and that quote, it's basically robin to Russia's Batman. And the challenge here is to try to attract it to the West, to get it to flip sides, end quote. Explaining former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych's decision to turn away from a new trade deal with the European Union, Rose compares Ukraine to a woman in a dysfunctional relationship with its boyfriend from the hood, he says, trading up to, quote, a nice yuppie, the EU.

until Putin offered the Ukrainian government a bribe of $15 billion in the period leading up to the coup. When Colbert confirms that the good guys are winning now and ask why Obama isn't, quote, spiking the football and mocking Vladimir Putin for the success of the coup, Rose explains that, quote, we don't want Russia to intervene and kick over the table like a game of risk and take Ukraine back. Yes? Oh, end quote. Yes, they could send troops.

He conceded. But he says, that's why we want to say, quote, oh, look, you got the highest medal count in the Olympics. You did really well. And so focus on the Olympics. Quote, oh, end quote. Quote, look, a shiny object. We'll just take an entire country away from you,

and, quote, Colbert gleefully added. Quote, basically, rose confirmed. This was similar to Victoria Newland and Jeffrey Piot's leaked discussion, the famous F-The-EU phone call, about getting the regime change all settled, including hand-picking Ukraine's new leaders before Putin could figure out how to react.

Newland is saying F-the-EU, because she's complaining that they're taking too long to get the coup going. Instead, they're going to bring in some people from the UN to, quote, glue it. At that point, Piat says, no, exactly, and I think we've got to do something to make it stick together, because you can be pretty sure that if it does start to gain altitude, the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it, end quote. So we've got to hurry up, and quote, midwife, end quote,

this thing. Just as in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, the hawk's hubris is unparalleled and is constantly their undoing. By the way, Newland responded to Pyatt that she just heard from then Vice President Biden's national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, Biden's current national security advisor, that Biden is, quote, willing, and that she is going to arrange a conference call between him and the new pending regime so that he can give them a, quote, add-a-boy, and, quote, get the deeds to stick, end quote. Seven months later, Putin threatened the European Commission President Jose Manuel Basaro, an Italian, quote, if I wanted to, I could take Kiev in two weeks. These statements should have been taken much more seriously at the time.

Again, enough mainstream foreign policy establishment types who said so before are still around to remind us. Even Thomas L. Friedman ran an I told you so in the New York Times, quoting his 1998 Kennan interview last week. The war party always resorts to their Hitler and Chamberlain at Munich analogies, but they're bunk. Putin is much more like Hindenburg than Hitler. Maybe instead of kicking Weimar Russia while they're down after the end of Cold War I, in such a Versailles treaty fashion, we could be better sports and help them to cultivate their republic to stave off darker forces, waiting for their chance to exploit the crisis. And on Russia's role in Syria, the various armed uprisings against the Assad regime in 2011 and 2012

would have been quickly destroyed by the regime there if the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Israel had not intervened on behalf of the supposed revolution, which was very quickly dominated by the jihadist followers of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Mousaba Zarqawi's merciless terrorist group from Iraq War II. Instead, U.S. and allied intervention on behalf of the bin Ladenites, motivated primarily by an animus against the Assad regime for its alliance with Iran, led directly to the rise of the Islamic State, which conquered Western Iraq in 2014 and raised the real threat in 2015 that a combined assault against Damascus by a,

advancing terrorist forces could lead to a fall of the regime. Only then, after Barack Obama, David Petraeus, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, and John Kerry's treason threatened a final victory for al-Qaeda and or ISIS in the capital city of Damascus, did Russia finally enter the war in late 2015. A secret recording of John Kerry, of Secretary Kerry, admitting to this fact, was leaked to the press in 2016. There's no excusing the massive civilian, so-called collateral damage inflicted on the people of Syria by the Russian Air Force flying on behalf of their government. But again, none of this would have happened if the USA and its allies didn't create such a dangerous situation in the first place. And the rates of civilian casualties caused by their airstrikes were no greater than those caused by the U.S. and their coalition in the anti-ISIS war in Iraq and eastern Syria at the very same time.

If you listen to them now, the hawks are all screaming that Russia has returned to the Middle East after 25 years. But since it's their fault, we shouldn't listen to them. Half the time, these same people boast that the Russians can't afford it and that we like to see them bogged down in an expensive fight far from home. By the way, all three major chemical attacks blamed on Bashar al-Assad's government in 2013, 2017, and 2018 were all hoaxes, perpetrated by the bin Ladenites to try to increase U.S. support for their cause. In the latter two cases, they got it.

In the first case, Russia brokered a deal to allow the organization for the prevention of chemical weapons, the OPCW, to destroy serious chemical weapons stocks as a compromise to avoid war after Obama's foolish declaration of his red line for full-scale intervention there. The great journalist Robert Perry believed that this cooperation between Obama and Putin in 2013 was part of the reason neo-conservatives, pushed so hard for the coup in 2014 in Ukraine to nip that growing relationship in the bud. Donald Trump ran for one thing on the promise that he wanted to quote, oh, sorry, the Trump ears. Donald Trump ran for one thing on the promise that he wanted to, quote, get along with Russia. Not that he had any real idea what issues divided the U.S. in Russia

or what should be done about them. He simply possessed the completely pedestrian insight that the evil empire ceased to exist more than a generation ago and that his predecessor's failures to forge a peaceful coexistence and partnership with Russia by this late date should be placed at their own feet. He also parroted former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's advice that the U.S. should seek partnership with Russia

to divide them from and use them against China. Getting the answer half right for the wrong reason. But when Trump hired Paul Manafort, the lobbyist for foreign states, who had worked for the previous Russia-leaning President Viktor Yanukovych in March 2016, they panicked. Never mind that Manafort, if anything, was serving American interests in attempting to persuade Ukrainian President Yanukovych and his party of regions to lean toward the U.S. and EU, and away from Russia. They had a narrative to run with.

Trump doesn't just want to get along with Russia. He wants to give them the keys to the entire castle. Collusion! Now, I don't really know what you know. So let me tell you, RussiaGate was just a big, fake hoax. CIA director Brennan and FBI director Comey and their underlings knew

that the entire story of Russian interiors, and Trump campaign so-called collusion was nonsense. The investigation was the end in itself. After the leaks about Russia's supposed hack of DNC emails failed to stop Trump's election, the CIA and the Democrats, I know this sounds so crazy, it sounds like I must be the one who's crazy, but really, check my facts in the New York Times. they wanted to have acting CIA director Mike Morel brief the electoral college

that Trump had cheated with the Russians to win, and so they should throw the election to Hillary Clinton, or at least to the House of Representatives, which could then name former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney or Ohio Congressman John Kasich to take his place. That, of course, went nowhere. Someone must have finally told him, the electors come from the state parties, not the D.C. suburbs, and there's no way in the world they were going to give Trump's win to anyone else.

Then, three days before his inauguration came the completely fake and stupid, so-called intelligence assessment, which is a made-up thing, written by a few people, quote, hand-picked by John Brennan, end quote, in place of a real national intelligence estimate, and which can, exactly zero substance whatsoever. This was followed by the leaking of the completely fake Christopher Steele dossier, alleging Trump's full subordination to Russia and its goals going back for years. Of course, the basis for the media printing the story was that the FBI's Comey had warned Trump about the fake accusations in it in the first place. After Trump fired Comey, the leaders of the Department of Justice plotted to try to invoke the 25th Amendment to get the cabinet to vote to remove Donald Trump from power.

Once they were sure they would fall short if they tried it, they settled on a plan to just pretend to investigate the fake treason plot for another two years. If they couldn't get rid of him, they could at least, quote, rein him in, unquote, as FBI officials told CNN. Amazingly, they kept this lie going for just short of three years. Well, dozens of them. The DNC of Podesta email hacks, which they have never proven were done by Russia, and later admitted they have no proof of a chain of custody to WikiLeaks Julian Assange.

Manafort's supposed handling of Trump for Putin, which of course never prosecuted because it was not true. George Papadopoulos and rumored emails stolen by Russia, which was revealed all to be an FBI-CIA setup in the first place. Carter Page's alleged deal to lift Russian sanctions. Yeah, sure, the Russians promised someone with no pull inside the Trump campaign a 19% ownership stake in Gazprom, the giant Russian government-owned oil firm. if only he would seize control of America's sanctions policy for them. It turned out in the end that Page was actually a loyal CIA asset, whom the agency had told the FBI was a solid guy and no traitor at all. The FBI censored this from their FISA search warrant application against Page,

alleging a pretended belief that he was an agent of the Kremlin in order to keep the investigation going. An FBI lawyer named Kevin Kleinsmith was convicted for this crime. Then there was Senator Sessions, Substanceless meetings with the Russian ambassador in his office and at a public speech. General Michael Flynn's call with the Russian ambassador, which was spun as treason for Russia, when in reality he was asking a favor of them on behalf of Israel. Oops.

Endless snipe hunts. for P-tapes, which even Steele's source admitted was made up. The big nothing Trump Tower meeting that we were told for years was the certain key to lock up the president's son for conspiracy and treason. Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen's non-existent trip to Prague to arrange for the Russian Facebook ad campaign that, in fact, was not run by the Russian government at all, was not aimed at influencing the election,

and flatly did not do so. The Russian plot to hack Vermont's power grid and shut off the heat in the dead of winter and C-SPAN TV. The prop or not blacklist of good journalists. The secret server communicating with Russian intelligence that really was just a Trump hotel spam bot. The Russian supposed invention of the Black Lives Matter movement to stir up those otherwise perfectly contented survivors. of state violence. The so-called Havana syndrome of psychosomatic, hysterical weaponized cricket chirps at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba. Yeah, no, really, the U.S. government said the Russians and Cubans were using a mind-control beam weapon that was causing all sort

of terrible psychosomatic efforts on the poor State Department victims therein. It turned out to be the mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket. The Russians hacking of all the state party's voter rolls. Remember that one? This one was an obvious hoax from the beginning. Long before they admitted it, you can go ahead and start with a scoff when the reports are coming from the Department of Homeland Security. They just want some attention. Then there was the Russian GRU's alleged intervention. in Brexit and in the French, German, and EU parliamentary and other elections throughout Europe.

And Putin's supposed influence looming behind Trump's choice of Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson for the Secretary of State job, and then later arranging for his eventual firing. All of these claims were eventually walked back or abandoned with another few thousand dishonest claims just like them and smears against everyone who knew

better along with them. Former FBI director Robert Mueller could have let it known from at least near the very beginning of his appointment as special counsel in 2017, that their investigation was not pointing to the fact that the president of the United States was guilty of treason in league with the Kremlin to destroy our democracy and all. As Bob Woodward explained in his 2018 book, Fear, Trump has. told his lawyer to give Mueller's team every scrap of paper from the 2016 campaign. No problem, not a thing to hide in the world.

Just as Woodward understood, and the Department of Justice must have known, this meant that from the very beginning there was nothing bare to find. They could have made that most important part of the story clear in a reasonable amount of time after that. Instead, we got 1,000 leaks from the spies and the feds for another two years trying to make us believe it was all true. When BuzzFeed somehow crossed the line by falsely claiming that Trump had instructed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress, Mueller quickly put out a press release denying it was true.

But whether the sitting president was guilty of high treason, of past and current subordinate nation to the most dangerous foreign power on the planet? Sorry, you'll just have to wait and wonder and watch TV speculate for another couple of years until we get back to you. And reigning Trump in worked in spades. Trump didn't have the intelligence or the strength to stand up to the national security state's onslaught. Desperate to prove what a traitor he wasn't to the American foreign policy establishment, Trump betrayed the American people and his promise to end the recent era of enmity and work things out with Russia. Instead, he oversaw the addition of Montenegro and northern Macedonia to NATO,

sent more American troops and equipment to Poland than the Baltics, including provocative military exercises and parades within just yards of the Russian border. Almost certainly sponsored an attempted color-coded revolution in Belarus, where Obama, the first black president to support a Nazi coup, was afraid to arm the regime forces who attack their countrymen in the eastern Dombas region for fear of a real escalation into war with Russia. Donald Trump has gone ahead and sent arms

to Ukraine's Nazi infested armed forces, sniper rifles, armed boats, RPGs, and javelin anti-tank missiles, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars worth of non-lethal equipment, like Humvees, night vision goggles, radars, and armor, along with training and joint military exercises. All this has just incentivized more violence after the major Minsk II peace deal

negotiated by Germany and France with the Russians and Ukrainians in 2015 had already been signed. For all the provocation of Russia provided by these arms, the last week seems to have shown that they entirely failed to deter the Russians or slow the advance into their country, or slow their advance into the country. If you can believe it, the House of Representatives of the United States of America actually impeached President Trump

over allegedly holding up part of this arms deal for a few days until he could generate some bad PR for ex-Vice President Biden, who we know was intimately involved in the 2014 coup and whose son got an in-name-only job at a major Ukrainian gas company in the aftermath for a cool $85,000 per month. That's a million dollars a year, which he blew on crack and sex workers while cheating on his wife and dead brother's widow at the same time. But anyway, holding up that arms deal was really bad. The Democrats thought, you know, worse than the genocide in Yemen. Worse than doubling down on a lost war in Afghanistan, and much worse than picking a fight with Russia, which is what he was actually doing.

Under Trump, the U.S. Navy stepped up its presence in the Black and Baltic seas and armed U.S. frigates in the Baltic Sea with medium-range cruise missiles that reduced first strike warning times, and which, of course, make the Russians launch-on-morning trigger-finger itch that much worse. He also increased U.S. Air Force bomber missions right up to the line of Russian airspace in the Baltic, Black, and Oshok seas in the far east, testing their radar and anti-aircraft abilities. The Trump administration also worked overtime to try to prevent the completion of the so-called Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, even going so far as to sanction the Swiss and German firms working on the project. On one hand, as Senator Rand Paul pointed out in a recent speech, this is about mercantilism, the power of American firms to lobby the U.S. government to intervene so that they can sell the Germans' natural gas instead. But it also seems to be an effort to prevent the Germans from deepening their ties with Russia. Lord Hastings-Lynel Ismay, NATO's first Secretary General, said the purpose of the alliance was, quote,

to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. End quote. But strengthening economic ties between Russia and Germany could lessen their supposed need for dependence on the U.S. military and the NATO alliance to protect them from a country they're getting along with just fine. Who needs the Americans then? You might remember from history

that the last two times Russia and Germany fought it was the worst thing that had ever happened. 30 million people were killed on the Eastern Front in World War II. That is a conservative estimate. No matter the cost and dollars, that pipeline of economic interdependence between these two major powers could be the greatest invention in the history of peace, valuable beyond measure in money. Worst of all, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the intermediate nuclear forces treaty, the INF Treaty,

which withdrew also from the Open Skies Treaty and had promised to let New Start expire in 2021 had he been re-elected. Open Skies, Dwight Eisenhower's idea, finally signed by President Bush Sr. in 1992, allowed for aircraft overflights of the U.S. and Russia by each other's air forces for surveillance, so that each side could reassure themselves the other was not mobilizing for war. It's now dead. Putin offered to revive it. Biden declined. When Trump did propose negotiations for a grand new nuclear deal between the U.S. and Russia,

the media slammed him as naive and dangerous and only proving, once again, treacherous agent of the dastardly Vladimir Putin he is. This is the deadly legacy of the Democrats, FBI, and CIA's Russiagate hoax. Millions of Americans caught up in the lies of these monsters came to believe that their country had quite literally been conquered by the Russians in a way that the communists only ever could in the movies. They had installed the Manchurian candidate, a compromised white supremacist agent of the Kremlin in the Oval Office with his finger on the big red button and all. Narratives about politicians and statesmen fighting over regional power and influence

gave way to cartoonish morality plays full of heroes and villains and black and white issues and perceptions about Russia taken from appraisals of Nazi Germany back in the 1940s, but that just do not apply to Russia today. You cannot negotiate with evil, as Dick Cheney might say. An important note about the INF Treaty. The MK41 missile launchers, Obama installed in Romania and Poland, are supposedly for firing defensive missiles, but they also fit medium-range tomahawk cruise missiles,

which can be tipped with hydrogen bombs. So the U.S. broke at least the spirit of the INF Treaty first. The same was true with the ships in the Baltic Sea, which also employ these possible dual-use launchers. Russia then developed some new missiles that were probably also in violation, but were only being used for deployment near Russia's frontier with China. But guess what? That's why the U.S. wanted out of the treaty, too, so they could deploy military. medium-range missiles against China. So instead of saying, hold on now, and trying to negotiate a continuation of the treaty,

this important Reagan-era treaty that kept medium-range nuclear missiles out of Europe for 30 years is now dead. More on that in a minute. Perhaps worst of all was Trump's 2018 nuclear posture review, which, like his official national Security Strategy announced a return to so-called great power competition, specifically citing the Russian threat and called for the development and deployment of more low-yield, so-called usable nuclear bombs and missiles. More on those in a minute. Announced that the United States will not seek ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and even denounces

the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which, of course, America signed back in 1968, promising to abolish our nuclear weapons stockpull completely, which, of course, has always been ignored anyway. In the summer of 2020, the disgusting New York Times CIA stenographer Charlie Savage wrote a trash article reporting on the fact of the existence of an obviously fake rumor that the Russians were paying the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The truth is, there was no truth to this at all. The Russians pay the Taliban for the same reason the U.S. spent the last years of the war

flying as their air force. They won the war and were a far better bet for fighting ISIS than the phony Afghan government the U.S. had created in Kabul. But the hoax was enough to preemptively cancel any attempt by Trump might have made to pull the troops out that summer. A possibility his people had begun to float as a possibility in the spring. All other things being equal, the best thing would have been to leave in the winter. But leaving in the summer nine months ahead of schedule would almost certainly have avoided the disaster that took place

when Biden postponed the withdrawal to September 2021, trying to evacuate just as the Taliban were marching into the capital city. Biden so far. Oh, not yet. Joe Biden came to power seemingly determined to increase tensions with Moscow. He vastly increased provocative naval missions in the Black Sea and increased weapons transfers to Ukraine. On the other hand, he did save the new START Treaty, which is the last standing Nuclear Weapons Treaty,

limiting overall deployed numbers of nuclear weapons by the U.S. and Russia. U.S. and Russia. And he also finally gave up and lifted the sanctions on the firm's building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Oh, what's that? Oh, sorry I spoke too soon. They're back on again. That didn't last very long. Apologies to John Stewart out there somewhere. Biden vowed to reinforce America's, quote, sacred commitment to NATO, to the NATO alliance in Europe and roll back Russia. Well, it has to be something. After helping lose a 20-year war in Afghanistan and turning Libya into a warring den of militias and bin Ladenites, the bureaucrats at Alliance headquarters were starting to get nervous. A New York Times headline from the end of 2020, says it all.

NATO needs to adapt quickly to stay relevant for 2030, report urges. They do not even know to be embarrassed. This is what they mean by self-licking ice cream cone. If the NATO alliance is not relevant, then why do we have it at all? How can their mission be sacred when they had to hold an emergency study group to decide what it is? The answer they came up with? China. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's new reason for existing is China.

Or maybe they just got lucky. a new lease on life in Eastern Europe instead. This is how the Bush and Obama governments talked about the Afghanistan war as well. It was a, quote, team-building exercise, end quote, for the Atlantic Alliance. In other words, these policies exist because all the vested interests want to stay paid without having to get a real job. It is understandable, but unacceptable. Iranian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Washington in September 2021 and asked to begin

negotiations toward Ukraine's admission to NATO. This may have been the final straw before President Putin began to build up forces at bases adjacent to Ukraine last fall. Putin proposed a treaty stating that Ukraine will not be brought into the alliance, that the U.S. promises not to station troops or offensive weapons there. to revive the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, and for the U.S. to withdraw its military footprint in NATO-member nations in Eastern Europe, as the Bill Clinton administration had promised not to do when embarking on the expansion project in 1997. Putin knows the U.S. will not agree to these terms, but he knows the U.S. will not seek to integrate Ukraine into NATO, in the medium term, at least.

Biden has said repeatedly, he does not. seek to integrate Ukraine into the alliance or station missiles there, and in his written response to Putin, offered serious guarantees that the U.S. will not deploy Tomahawk cruise missiles to Romania and Poland, even with the INF Treaty being dead, and including offered for a new negotiations for a new verification regime. On both of these major points, Putin has already won. But apparently the situation in the Donbass and the failure of the Kiev government to fully implement the Minsk 2 peace deal of 2015, which would have given the Donbass increased autonomy and also veto power over the foreign policy decisions

of the government in Kiev was too much. On Monday the 21st, the 8th anniversary of the 2014 coup against Yanukovych, Putin announced he was recognizing the so-called independence of the two breakaway provinces of Donetsk in Luhansk and began marching his so-called peacekeepers in. At the time I'm giving this talk on Saturday the 26th, the Russians have taken over much of the country and seem to be in the process of conquering the rest. In his statement Monday, Putin certainly made an argument

broad enough to justify seizing the entire country of Ukraine and integrating it into the Russian Federation. So I said at the beginning, it's not clear what his goals are at this point. In a way, Putin's absorption of the Donbass has actually a major loss for Russia. It made more sense to leave that strongly pro-Russian population inside Ukraine to at least possibly one day again

serve as a balance against the Western Ukrainian nationalists. That seemed to have been a major part of why he did not incorporate the Donbass back in early 2015 when they voted to ask to join Russia. Now that Putin has taken them away from Ukraine, he has strengthened the hands of his opponents. Now it seems he has escalated to full-scale war, possibly in an attempt to solve that problem. So far, the U.S. and its allies have launched an all-out diplomatic and economic war against Russia in response.

What future demands will he issue? What will the Western and NATO reaction be? I hate to consider it. Biden has sworn the U.S. will not fight for Ukraine, but they would still escalate the economic and diplomatic war to a point it could break out into a real war with NATO anyway. The Germans have already announced the cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and all of the Western nations and our East Asian allies have all announced a massive new round of sanctions against Russia. Biden has increased troop levels in the Baltics,

though thankfully still not above decorative levels. It doesn't have to be this way. The U.S. should send someone capable if the Secretary of State isn't up to it to hammer out a deal. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas McGregor, an expert at the top of his field on the question of how to fight a war against Russia and Eastern Europe, if it ever came down to it, is proposing a deal recognizing Ukrainian neutrality and the scaling back of U.S. and other NATO forces in Eastern Europe in exchange for Russia staying east of the Nipa River. At this point, that would mean they would have to withdraw

from Lviv, Kiev, and Odessa. Either way, it shows that this is a peripheral interest to America at all, while it's obviously central to Russia's policy. Okay, take half, but no more. And we will pull back our military presence in Eastern Europe, because the Russians really do have a point that putting them there does not spread peace and security, but suspicion and destabilization. Well, what's it all about? Well, it isn't the threat of Soviet communism dead and gone 30 years now. Putin is correct when he consistently refers to America as Russia's, quote, partners.

In 2021, the U.S. imported somewhere around 20 million barrels. million barrels of Russian oil and gas per month. I swear this is true. One week ago today, the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine successfully launched a rocket and satellite into orbit together. Again. And it isn't about containing Russian aggression, which exists mostly in the minds of their aggressive accusers. Russia's entire GDP last year was $1.5 trillion. When you include the VA and the energy

department's care and feeding of the nuke's stockpile, the U.S. spends a trillion dollars per year on our military. Russia spends $60 billion. We have more than a million man army spread throughout the world. They have 420,000 men and they almost all stay home, except special operations types in Ukraine and those in some air power in Syria, where again the U.S. has provoked their intervention through irresponsible policies in the first place. The Russians have one broken-down old diesel-powered aircraft carrier. America has 11 nuclear-powered carrier battle groups throughout the world at all times, 20 carriers overall. The U.S. has more than three times the amount of military aircraft as the Russians, when including the U.S. Air Force

and Navy. But Congressman Adam Schiff of California says, we have to fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here. He really said that. So far, Putin has absorbed the Donbass region in the far east of Ukraine. in the name of recognizing their so-called independence, at least from Kiev. Some experts claim that Putin is determined to recreate the USSR, or at least the old Russian empire. But the residual fear left over from the Russiagate hoax has tainted Americans' position so badly, it's hard to know how serious any of that is. Putin has begun insisting that NATO be rolled all the way back.

to Germany, like in the deal George H.W. Bush made. Whether he really intends to call America's bluff in the Baltics or Poland remains to be seen. The man has been president of Russia for 20 years, virtually uninterrupted, and up until now, betrayed no intention of going this far. Again, in February 2015, the Dombas voted to join Russia and Putin told them no. Lyle Goldstein, an expert at defense priorities, formerly with the Naval War College, told me on Monday he believed the failed, so-called revolution staged by the U.S. and in Belarus last year was the final straw that changed Putin's calculations. After decades of slights, that was the last one.

In his speech last Monday, February the 21st, when Putin announced his government's recognition of the so-called independence of the Donbass region, Donetsk and Lahansk, he again complained in quite explicit terms about Gorbachev's decision to allow independence not only for the Warsaw Pact states, but also for the former so-called republics, the Baltics, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Belarus, and Ukraine, leaving ethnic Russians behind and allowing for security threats on their borders. He brought up the danger of Ukraine's admission to NATO and the eventual deployment of missiles and other American forces armaments being stationed there. If the Biden administration truly has no intention of installing such missiles, they should have given all

the assurances necessary to satisfy Russia's legitimate security concerns there. Again, not that it justifies what Putin has done here or the worsening problems that are almost certain to come from it. But many of his worst accusations about the actions of the U.S.-led West in Ukraine were true, including the breaking of Bush senior's no NATO expansion promises, CIA support for the bin Ladenai terrorists in Chechnya, Libya, and Syria, the war against Serbia to break off Kosovo, Iraq War II, and Bush's withdrawal from the anti-ballistic missile treaty, dual-use launchers at ABM sites in Eastern Europe, the 2014 coup, and the subsequent and ongoing war in the east, including U.S. training for fighters and all the American and allied arms and advisors in the country since 2014,

cooperation with the U.S. Navy that he says puts the Russian Black Sea Fleet at risk. He also credibly claimed that the Ukrainian military had already been integrated into NATO and has given access to U.S. surveillance drones and planes. TV says Putin is just a psycho case, who wants to be a great czar in history or something like that. Why else could he possibly be acting this way? I think this part of his speech is worth quoting. Quote, after the U.S. destroyed the INF Treaty, the Pentagon has been openly developing many land-based attack weapons,

including ballistic missiles that are capable of hitting targets at a distance of up to 5,500 kilometers. If deployed in Ukraine, such systems will be able to hit targets in Russia's entire European. in part. The flying time of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Moscow will be less than 35 minutes. Ballistic missiles from Kharkiv will take seven to eight minutes and hypersonic assault weapons four to five minutes. It is like a knife to the throat, end quote. This all provided Putin with a compelling narrative to his domestic audience that Ukrainian independence was a mistake because it just cannot be without the West taking it over. Purposely echoing the arguments of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Putin invoked an illusory

nuclear weapons threat, quote, weapons of mass destruction, end quote, from Ukraine, and his determined to protect the people of the Donbass from so-called, quote, genocide, end quote. He claimed that Ukraine has been, quote, reduced to a colony with a puppet regime, end quote, by the United States, and essentially argued that he would be justified in conquering the entire country. Again, I am not saying that his actions are reasonable. They are not. But his argument is rational, if angry, more substance than bluster. Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. has no intention of inviting Ukraine into NATO any time in at least the next 10 years, but it was somehow decided that it was a, quote, sacred, end quote, principle that no one can ever, quote, close the door, end quote, on NATO membership for anyone else. So if Putin wants the obvious in writing, forget it. That would be led. him, quote, close the door, which would be intolerable.

So it's come to this over alliance membership, which is truly not on offer, and missiles the U.S. has no real intent to install. Biden now argues that those are just pretexts for war. Maybe the U.S. should have given in and called Putin's bluff, since these are their policies anyway, they could have just put it in writing. This is not just anti-war.com's point of view. Many liberal, conservative, and realist scholars

and experts agree on the same thing. Russia has very real security concerns here, and the U.S. and its allies should recognize that and treat them with the respect they deserve. Not more than that. but just what is right. The only risk to the United States itself is that our government would get us into a nuclear war

over a country where we have no national interests whatsoever like Ukraine. The original Red Dawn invasion occupation scenario makes for a hilarious and awesome movie. But it is just a movie. Wrong, Kami, it's Houston. Sorry, I just love that. Speaking of the Wolverines,

what will the U.S. trained neo-Nazi-infested stay behind militias and saboteurs accomplish against Russia? Will the U.S. and its allies provide them safe haven in Poland from which to fight? Why is the U.S. government taking such risks? It's the money. As Richard Cummings did such a great job of explaining in his 2007 article, Lockheed stock and two smoking barrels. The 1990s-era U.S. Committee to expand NATO was a project of Lockheed Martin Vice President Bruce Jackson.

The whole thing was just a racket for selling jets, either directly to the eastern European states or failing that to force the American taxpayer to pick up the tab for them. A fun anecdote about that. In the spring of 2014, Harper's magazine reporter Andrew Coburn reported that he had a source who had been at a big party in Crystal City outside of Washington, D.C., an area heavy with military contractors and lobbyists, when it was announced that the Russian sailors were leaving their bases and seizing the Crimean Peninsula. They all started laughing and cheering and celebrating. Forget patrolling posthum peasants in Pactica. The massive build-up against the renewed Russian threat was exactly the conflict these men were looking and hoping for,

threatening the future of our entire species so that they don't have to get real jobs. You'll note that while the Army and Air Force focused on Eastern Europe, The Navy and Marines are much more concerned with implementing their air-sea battle doctrines in East Asia, while the Special Operations Command is busy doubling down in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and on into West Africa. What accounts for the different services perception of the threats facing America? It's all in the game. The entire U.S. military is, as they themselves call it, a self-licking ice cream cone, dedicated

to its own perpetuation at any cost and conveniently, continually creating the disasters which are said to require their next intervention. Full spectrum dominance is a government program. As such, it is the means and the end in itself. Of course, we shouldn't sell the American foreign policy establishment too short. They are not only greedy, but seem to truly believe their own public relations about how smart and moral and exceptional they are.

As Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, explained in 1998, quote, if we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future. And we see the danger here to all of us. She was defending bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia, a policy which got 3,000 Americans killed just three and a half years later. Nukes.

The elephant in the room here, of course, are the hydrogen bombs, otherwise known as thermonuclear fusion bombs or strategic nuclear weapons. One of these in the high kiloton or low megaton range can kill your entire city in a single shot. Barack Obama pushed a massive appropriation toward revamping the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal as well as a complete overhaul of the entire industry. All the factories and national laboratories too. They started by saying the project would cost $1 trillion.

dollars. Now they say it's 1.75 trillion. We'll be lucky if it's only three or four trillion dollars by the time they're done. And this, after spending almost six trillion dollars on the current nuclear arsenal during the last arms race with the Russians in the 20th century. This was the only way to get the new START treaty ratified by the Senate. The nuclear weapons caucuses, financial needs, must be satisfied for us to have any limits on overall stockpiles and deployed nukes at all. Much of the time, if you listen to the D.C. Wonks talk about it, the H-bombs just go without saying.

Of course, everybody knows that both sides are armed to the teeth with them, but then they just seem to get left out, leaving entire plans and discussions about war with Russia, uh, pardon me, leaving entire plans and discussions about war revolving around the idea that we could really just fight a conventional war with Russia, like in some fun fantasy of a junior tank officer or a stay-at-home PlayStation General. But both sides still have about 2,000 nuclear and thermonuclear bombs deployed, with approximately another 4,000 in reserve. Possibly even more dangerous than the multi-megatons city killers are the new dial-a-yield bombs,

capable of being detonated at so-called usable, low-yield strengths in the tens or even single-digit kilotons. They also come with new and improved proximity fuses that make them far more accurate. This might sound like an improvement, but at the same time, it makes the actual. use of these weapons seem far more plausible to the men in control of them. It was only announced two years ago that the first of the new generation of these new weapons have been deployed on U.S. submarines. The Americans have a theory that the Russian's new military doctrine in Europe is to, quote, escalate to de-escalate. That is, in the event of war, to use one small nuke, to dissuade any further escalation by our side.

But the U.S. wants the Russians to know that that won't work. The U.S. will escalate back, not disengage. To drive this point home, a story was leaked in 2020 about a war game which included the use by Russia of a low-yield nuke under their alleged new doctrine. So in this simulation, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper immediately nuked them right back. Hans Christensen from the Federation of American Scientists says the leak was also a public relations stunt to get Congress to fund the new submarine launched low-yield cruise missile.

By the way, in Andrew Coburn's book, Rumsfeld, his rise, fall, and catastrophic legacy, Coburn describes how the former Secretary of Defense filling in as the president while playing continuity of government simulation games in the 1990s would always blow up the world every chance he got. Even when the game was designed to provide off-ramps from full omnis side, Rumsfeld still went for it every time. In real life, this type of exchange, beginning with so-called tactical nukes, would almost certainly devolve into general nuclear war and the destruction of the northern hemisphere and the starvation of billions more as war simulations carried out by Princeton University demonstrated in 2019. Any people who survived would have been set back centuries. Even an extremely so-called limited nuclear war, such as between India and Pakistan, could kill as many people as all who died in World War II in a single day. The soot from the fires, rising high above the clouds where it cannot be rained out, could be enough to darken sunlight enough to cause nuclear winner, massive global crop failures, and the death of billions.

And for what? To keep Russia from occupying Leviv, Tallinn, or Vilnius? Cities most Americans have never heard of before in their lives? In another recent DOD exercise, Russia nukes Ukraine first, and the U.S. responds by nuking their ally, Belarus. Who makes this stuff up? If you want to know how crazy America's nuclear weapons policy really is. Please read the Doomsday Machine by the great Vietnam War whistleblower

Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. He was also a nuclear war planner and has some serious things to tell you in there. For example, back in the 1950s, the one and only nuclear war plan said that in the event of a crisis with the Soviets in, say, West Berlin, the U.S. would nuke every single city in the Soviet Union and China. Though that was revised somewhat in the Kennedy years, anecdotes since that time are not reassuring. Old iron ass, Dick Cheney, was said to be astonished and disturbed when seeing a simulation of a U.S. nuclear war against Russia, which included scores and scores of strikes on Moscow long after it would have ceased to exist.

Quote, Moscow turned into a solid red, covered over and over with ludicrous targets. A witness later said, Cheney started squirming around and finally asked one of his military aides, why were we doing this kind of thing? End quote. Well, you see, every service wants two. cracks at every target, because what if the first shot is a dud? Better make it three Air Force gravity bombs, two ICBMs, two Tomahawk cruise missiles, and a couple of sub-launched Polaris missiles at this one radar station on the edge of

town, just to be sure. And every new weapon invented and deployed is then added to the list while the old ones remain. year after year, it adds up to just comic book crazy situations, such as nuking cities full of people, and then the empty craters over and over and over again. As Ellsberg recounted, when he left his first viewing of Dr. Strange Love, he and a Rand corporation colleagues said to each other, that wasn't a satire, it was a documentary. It seems crazy and alarm. to even consider. After all, what could we really have to fight about with Russia that's now more important than all the crises of the first Cold War era? But it is crazy, and that's why we should be alarmed. And we should do everything we can to shout down those ignorant TV slogan repeating mine of birds in our communities who've climbed on board the bandwagon on this issue.

It is no different than the demonization of any of the U.S. government's enemies here and around the world. Virtually, the entire popular narrative is fake. The older generation is used to hating Russia, and the young have been sold a line about Russian aggression throughout Eastern Europe for years now. And, of course, the Russiagate hoax and the dastardly Putin inflicting Trump upon our land, which has seemingly forever damaged the brains of America's Democrats. But the USA, not Russia, is the world empire. And it shouldn't be.

Primacy and the old world is a fool's errand. This is the middle part of North America. Our supposed limited constitutional republic should never have tried it. And while it's possible that economic catastrophe could end the era of attempted predominance before a nuclear war does, it seems like the more responsible course would be to recognize the self-destructive nature of our current policy and just call it all off now while we're still ahead. Even Victoria Newland's husband, Robert Kagan, author of the doctrine of benevolent global hegemony, admitted in the Washington Post the other day that the unipolar

moment is truly over now. The former power disparity between the U.S. and the two major independent powers of Russia and China has now begun to shift back. Quote, it is time to start imagining a world where Russia effectively controls much of Eastern Europe, and China controls must of East Asia and the Western Pacific. Americans and their democratic allies in Europe will have to decide again whether that world is tolerable. Tolerable? Oh, end quote. Tolerable?

Compared to what? Better dead than also red, white, and blue? Sorry, I'm almost done, guys. Strobe Talbot was Bill Clinton's roommate at Oxford when they were Rhodes Scholars, and later became his national security advisor, and eventually became one of the biggest promoters of NATO expansion inside the Clinton administration of the 1990s. 1990s. In 2018, a New York Times reporter went to see Talbot to ask what went wrong with the American-Russian relationship. Talbot conceded that NATO expansion had been provocative, but argued

in his own defense that, quote, if the leadership of a country has any view but the following, it's not going to be the leadership of that country for very long. And that is, We do what we can in our own interest, end quote. When it came to NATO expansion, Talbot asked rhetorically, quote, should we have had a higher, a higher, should we have had a higher, wiser concept of our real interests that would require us to hold back on what many people would say is our current interest? It's just a simple matter of time preference.

Should we worry more about angering and provoking Russia, ruining our new friendly relationship, and risking going back to the bad old days of the Cold War 24 years from now? Or should we worry about collecting Polish votes and Lockheed dollars right now? To us, the answer is obvious. To them it is too. But they got it wrong. Never had to.

be this way. Putin and his men obviously, again, are responsible for the decisions that they have made and the blood on their hands. But the fact remains that it is the USA which has picked this fight so far from our shores. Of course, in the current political climate, any statement or position that contains anything better than most overly simplistic, other side-bashing, fear-mongering point of view is spun from on high as not just pro-Russian, but also obviously secretly controlled by Russia. Because what other explanation for someone not believing the hype could there possibly be? But that's why the current political climate must change. America's relationship with Russia is the single most important matter facing humanity. We all deserve policies that will bring an end to the

system, which requires a perpetual nuclear sword hanging over all of our necks, while tragic proxy conflicts are waged against innocent people, and the threat of real war breaking out is higher that at any time since the early 1980s, if not the early 1960s. This essential issue is one where libertarians can lead by telling the truth and demanding an end to this insane game of militarism and global hegemony so that we can truly live in peace and prosperity together. Thank you.