Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/6/22 Stephen Walt: A Realist’s Take on the War in Ukraine

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

Stephen Walt joined Scott for Antiwar Radio this week to give his view of the war in Ukraine. Walt is one of the leaders of the doctrine known as “foreign policy realism.” He starts by explaining what separates the realists from other schools of thought in the foreign policy space. He then ties those insights into the current war Russia has launched on Ukraine. He ends by explaining what will lead to escalation, and what has to happen in order for the war to end. Discussed on the show: The Israel Lobby The Hell of Good Intentions Stephen Walt is Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy. He is a regular contributor to ForeignPolicy.com. Follow him on Twitter @stephenWalt. 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

Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers,

you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexsavers.cavers.cai to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. For Pacifica Radio, May 8th, 2022, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all, welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com. and author of the book, Enough Already.

Time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,700 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, y'all, and introducing today's guest, it's Stephen M. Walt, professor at Harvard University

and one of the leaders of America's realist school of foreign policy studies. He's co-author of the book The Israel Lobby with John J. Mearsheimer, and he's also the author of The Hell with Good Intentions. No, it's the hell of good intentions. America's foreign policy elite

and the decline of U.S. primacy and other great books like that. Welcome back to the show. Stephen, how are you doing, sir? I'm not doomed badly, Scott. Nice to be with you. I really appreciate you joining us on the show today. And could you just destroy you?

for us, real kind of thumbnail take, on what makes you a realist compared to, say, a neocon or a liberal interventionist or a non-interventionist like myself? Sure. I mean, I think realists begin with the recognition that there is no central agency or institution in the world that can protect states from each other, enforce agreements, ensure cooperation, that it's a world of anarchy, where every state is ultimately reliant on its own resources, and its own strategies to survive. It's a world where every state is ultimately out for itself.

That doesn't mean there's no cooperation. It doesn't mean that war is happening all the time. But it does mean there's a big premium on security. And that states, especially major powers, are going to compete with each other, going to be suspicious of each other, and are going to worry if they think their security is being threatened, certainly true here in the United States,

but also true of other major powers. powers. And that leads some people to think that realists are, you know, hawkish or hardliners or warlike. It's actually quite the opposite. Realists tend to be very respectful of how dangerous the world is, how lots of things lead to unintended consequences, that military power is useful, but is a very crude instrument whose effects you can't predict. And that, therefore, you want to be really careful when you conduct foreign policy. You don't want to head off on a lot of wild crusades. You don't want to assume that everything's going to go your way all the time or that everyone in the world is going to agree with you just because you think you're on the right

side. So realists tend to be rather prudent in how they approach foreign policy. And that's why realists, you know, were among the leaders of the opposition to the Iraq war in 2003. Realists were also very concerned that NATO enlargement was ultimately going to cause enormous trouble in various ways and so forth and so on. That's, I think, a good short summary of where realists are at intellectually and how they think about foreign policy. I think the principal alternative, and this has been a long tension in American foreign policy, is between various forms of idealists who think that American foreign policy should be based on trying to promote democracy and other liberal values around the world. But that's really our mission.

to spread these principles everywhere we possibly can, and ideally to do so peacefully, but if necessary, to use economic sanctions, to use military power to try and do that, based on the belief that this will create a harmonious world where everybody gets along, and as a result, you know, Americans will both be richer, but also safer. And that's very appealing, right? That vision is one that's you know, undeniably attractive. The problem is it's also quite impractical because we generally don't know how to create democracies in other societies, particularly ones that are very different from ourselves. And moreover, trying to do that immediately causes problems when you run up against non-democracies. It immediately makes countries like China or Russia feel threatened, not to mention

in some other countries as well. It also exposes the United States to the charge of hypocrisy that we're willing to try and promote democracy in some places, but not in others, not say in Saudi Arabia as well. We'll turn a blind eye to human rights violations when it's done by friends of ours, even though we're critical of our enemies

when they do things like that. And I think it's a sort of liberal internationalist or liberal interventionist, along with neoconservatives, who are basically liberal internationalists on steroids, who think you can do all of this very easily and especially with lots of military power. Those have been the two principal intellectual rivals to the realist way of thinking. And by and large, we have a sort of healthy competition between these groups for a long time. It was after the Cold War, when the United States was briefly in this position of tremendous power,

where we thought we could kind of do anything we wanted and no one would stop us. It was at that moment that the liberal internationalists and the neocons joined forces and led the United States into all sorts of unhappy adventures. So I'm very interested in the question of all this selflessness on the part of, you know, the Americans, ever since World War I, right? We just want peace without victory. We're not trying to conquer Europe. We're just trying to spread stability.

And you hear this, you know, especially in the Middle East and in Eastern European affairs and whatever, that it's all about what they call the liberal rules-based international order. What glares out at me is the hypocrisy. We help His Royal Highness, the King of Saudi Arabia, commit genocide in Yemen for seven years at the same time that we're talking about, oh, we have to spread democracy to, of course, the country's, we don't control yet, like Iraq or Syria or Russia, if they have their way. We'll overthrow Kyrgyzstan, but not Uzbekistan, because we like that guy. So to me, it's the hypocrisy that jumps out the most, but I think that maybe means that I overlook something that you really are focusing more on, which is just how much the foreign policy establishment tells themselves these tales about their selflessness. It seems like they're just cynically lying to

me, but in other words, I guess they're cynically lying to themselves, too. I think that you can probably find some examples of people who, you know, cynically saying things that they knew were not true. But I think it's actually in most cases, the overwhelming set of cases, it's a delusion rather than deception. I think many people in the American foreign policy establishment, you know, genuinely are trying to do good for the country and good for the world. They believe a set of ideas about how to promote American interests, which they also believe will be the world's interests, and they're very energetic about doing that. Now, that leads, I think, unfortunately, to a lot of group think, sort of everybody thinking alike, and therefore nobody

thinking very much, and certainly to a certain lack of accountability. You know, when these things don't work out, the people who are responsible for them are never held accountable, they simply, you know, leave power for a few years, come back in and do it again. I did want to go back to one thing you said, though. I mean, the United States has, along with some others, been responsible for trying to promote, you know, this so-called rules-based order. And that has been partially successful in much of the world, and I think has been a good thing. It's better to have a set of rules. In fact, you have to have some set of rules to manage relations among countries. And many of the institutions the United States helped promote, I think have had a positive effect.

The hypocrisy takes a different form, and it's really a more important one, which is that is, the United States likes this rules-based order, except when the rules get in the way of something we want to do. So it was a violation of the so-called rules-based order. It was a violation of the UN Charter when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. So we haven't talked all the time about the importance of a rules-based order, and then, of course, we went off the other way when it proved inconvenient. And, of course, that makes it a little bit harder for the United States to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which we should condemn. But it's quite easy for others to say, well, gee, you know, you didn't think it was such a bad idea to invade another country back in 2003. how can you be so critical of what Putin is doing in Ukraine today?

And it's that form of hypocrisy that ultimately undermines support for any notion of rules or the idea that these rules ought to be followed not just by weaker countries, but also by stronger ones like us. And the point is it's not just the hypocrisy and the anger that people feel. And I think it's important to point that out. But it's also that if the most powerful country is, is willing to violate the rules with impunity, then other countries, even other major powers have to wonder about what that country might do.

If it's willing to break the rules when it's convenient for the United States, then other countries have to worry about whether or not at some point in some set of circumstances the United States might come after them. Now, you know, it's customary in the United States to think that Vladimir Putin is paranoid and out of touch, and there was no reason for him to invade Ukraine. And again, I'm not going to defend that decision at all. It was a brutal, illegal, immoral thing to do. But the idea that he had no reason to be worried about what the world's most powerful country might do in certain circumstances because we'd shown our willingness to break the rules, he had reason to worry about. And so did

other countries. So did lots of weaker states. The more the United States is willing to violate the principles, it claims are so important, the more that other states are going to try to take actions to make it hard for the United States to do that, whether or not the United States ever ultimately intends to. They are going to have to hedge because, again, it's a realist world where every country is ultimately responsible for trying to safeguard its own security. Well, it seems like the history of the last 20, 30 years, is this group think and this consensus about, which to me just seems childish, and I have a good example for you. I know this is a little bit more than 280 characters, but it was something very close to this. And Applebaum

from the Washington Post tweeted out a few months back, maybe in December or January, before the war, I think. She says, look, Putin is the aggressor, and he knows it. And NATO is a defensive alliance only, and he knows that too. And he knows that everything he does is bad because he's evil and everything we do is defensive and good because that's what we're doing. And it's just as simple as that. And everybody else is disinformation. And it seems to me like every single person inside the Beltway agrees 100% with her. And nobody's willing to just say, come on. You know, I got some prehistory to discuss here, which makes that kind of more complicated, you know? I think one of the most important lessons one can have when you're thinking about international affairs

is to remember that it's not just what you think is going on and what your narrative is and what your beliefs are. Those are important, and those may even be right in some circumstances, but it's absolutely important to try and understand how the world looks from somebody else's perspective. That doesn't mean you have to agree with them. That doesn't mean you think that view is right. But if you're trying to get somebody else to change their behavior, if you're trying to do business in the international system, you have to recognize how they're, they view a situation. I think the biggest error in what Ms. Applebaum says there is the assumption that, of course, Vladimir Putin doesn't have genuine, sincere, and legitimate reasons for concern. You don't have to agree with Putin's view of the world. You might be willing to say that, yes,

NATO is a purely defensive alliance. But the point is, it's not what NATO thinks it is. It's what Russia thinks it is. And whether or not Russia has any reason to be concerned about the world's most powerful alliance, moving steadily eastward up against Russia's borders, taking a variety of other actions in other parts of the world that have been inimical to Russian interests, and basically showing almost complete disregard for Russian security concerns, because we didn't think there was anything they could do about them. Again, that's not to defend Putin. That's saying, if I want to change his behavior, I got to start by understanding it properly, instead of just assuming, well, We're the good guys. He's evil. And that's the end of the story.

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

Libertarian Institute.org slash donate. And they've got a bunch of great titles, including Inside Syria by the late great Reese Erlich. That's listen and think.com. But one thing that really bothers me here is that I mean, we are talking about the Obama government minus Obama. But we know that Biden, as they say, held the brief on Ukraine in the Obama government when the U.S. very much participated in the overthrow of that government in 2014. Mayor Scheimer, your partner there, wrote in foreign affairs back in 2014 about that, that that much was clear that America had bankrolled the organizations that had

bankrolled the Maidan protests and all of that and pushed all of that forward and then immediately recognized the new regime and all of these things. So it seems to me, like maybe after hours when they're drinking whiskey that Biden and Blinken and Sullivan might be able to admit to each other that like, hey, we kind of did maybe push it a little too far with that 2014 coup there. I mean, after all, it blew up immediately into a war. I mean, obviously, they're never going to admit that on TV, but it seems like they'd at least admit it to themselves craft a policy based on the recognition that, you know what, we are

pretty relentless with our multiple attempts to. influence elections inside Belarus and Kazakhstan and wherever else we're squaring around all the time, you know? Let me make a couple points. I mean, I actually believe that the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president, was primarily a domestic event. It was primarily a sincere opposition to his rule of whether it was done in a constitutional fashion.

I think that's clearly it wasn't the case. But I don't think this was something that the United States engineered. That said, when the process happened, yes, we certainly got behind it. We certainly supported it rhetorically and in some other ways. We were actively involved in trying to select or influence the selection of his successor, et cetera, et cetera. Now, you don't have to adopt a sort of conspiracy theory here to understand why this would be of some concern to Russia, which, of course, had been cultivating Yanukovych for a long time and had a good relationship with him. And you sometimes hear people say now that, well, you know, Putin isn't

really scared of NATO. It has nothing to do with NATO. What he's really scared about is democracy in Russia. He's worried about another color revolution like the ones that have happened in parts of Eastern Europe, such as Ukraine in the past. And my point is those two things are not unrelated. He's worried about both. He's obviously worried about some of the military implications of having a powerful alliance on Russia's borders the same way any great power would be worried about that. But he is genuinely, I think, worried that we might be actively supporting some kind of democratic movement in Russia. And maybe we're not. Maybe we have nothing to do with that. But you can certainly understand how he could look at the last 25 years and think that that might be part of our objective. Remember that the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, and the Obama

administration all made it clear that trying to spread democracy around the world was one of the principal goals of American foreign policy. This was especially evident in Clinton and in Bush. Well, if we're saying out loud that that's our goal and you're an undemocratic leader someplace, you have every reason to think that the United States would be nudging things to try and push your country towards becoming a democracy. Now, that doesn't mean we're going to invade the country and impose it, particularly if you're a relatively strong country, and particularly if you have nuclear weapons. But if you're someone like Vladimir Putin, of course you would regard that as alarming. We don't have to like his rule. We don't have

to like him as a person. In fact, there's every reason to be extremely critical of the man, But you have to understand that he would regard what was going on there in Ukraine in 2014 as a sign of what could happen to him and therefore something he would try to oppose. Where I really fault the Obama administration is they never contemplated the possibility that Russia might, A, object to what was going on and B, do something about it, which of course is what they did by seizing Crimea and starting to support the separatist movement in the Don. And that is, of course, where this whole process that has led to the current war really gets going. And again, I think Americans simply failed to appreciate the degree to which this was an existential concern for them and therefore was going to lead them to do something quite horrible. I'll just say more broadly. I mean, I think the solution here has been true for a long time that, you know, given Ukraine's location and history, the proper outcome all along has been for Ukraine to remain a neutral. country, to not be allied with Russia, not be allied with NATO, be free to trade with anyone

it wants to, be able to defend itself. And that's the only way for Ukraine to be relatively secure. We've seen the consequences of Ukraine trying to gravitate towards the West and becoming, I don't want to overstate things, but becoming to some degree almost a de facto. member of NATO. We were arming the Ukrainians from 2017 onward. We had started having joint military exercises with them. Secretary of State Blinken signed a security cooperation agreement last fall. So Ukraine was now moving into the Western camp, and that was the one thing that Russia had said was completely unacceptable. Again, I don't defend what Russia did, and I think the way in which they've prosecuted this war is is really quite horrible it's also an enormous blunder from them

from their perspective but i also understand the concerns that led them to take this you know very risky illegal and immoral action as well now um double part question here one is the Biden administration's essential refusal to negotiate i mean they did have a counteroffer where they said you can inspect our MK-41 missile launchers in Poland and some things. In fact, Derek Chollett did a podcast recently where he said, no, we just absolutely refused the question of putting in writing that we would not invite Ukraine into NATO. And essentially, their diplomacy last December was, you better not do it. But they weren't really willing to negotiate very seriously.

And now their absolute unwillingness to negotiate and to push this issue, The total lack of shuttle diplomacy is the huge deafening silence here. But Tony Blinken hasn't met with Sergei Lavrov since February 15th. And they talk quite a bit about how much they like to see Russia weakened. Even Blinken and Austin, the secretaries of state and defensive said, we're trying to weaken Russia now. And they bring up the analogy of Afghanistan in the 80s against the Soviet Union and Rambo three days. So, and one more thing here is David Sanger in the New York Times stated as a flat,

fact, all these arms that we're pouring in makes us co-belligerence in the war. So I wonder what you think of all this and how much danger we're really in of escalating into a war between NATO and Russia. Yeah. Those are all good questions. So I give the Biden administration high marks for one thing, and that's for the way in which they've managed the relations with our NATO allies. I think they've managed to keep everybody on the same page reasonably well, no big departures, big frictions there. But that's, I think, the only part that they have handled particularly well. As you say, we did not, in fact, negotiate seriously back in the fall when it was quite clear that Russia was beginning to mobilize. And it was quite clear why they were mobilizing as well.

And we were never willing to take Ukrainian membership in NATO off the table, which was the most important thing for Russia. Remember, that pledge was made way back in time. 2008 at the Bucharest summit. There was a big disagreement within NATO when the Bush administration proposed them for membership. Other states in NATO said, no, we don't want them in. And the compromise was that was saying, well, they're going to get in, but not now. And this was a red flag to Moscow in a variety of ways. Now, of course, we feel like we're bound by that promise, which of course were not. But I do think the Biden administration was reluctant to walk that back, partly because they still believe in it at some ideological level, but also this was right

in the aftermath of the Afghan withdrawal. And I think they were worried that if they appeared to compromise at all on this issue, they'd be accused of appeasement. They'd be accused of backing down to a dictator. In the aftermath of Afghanistan, this would be seen as enormous weakness as well. So that was just never on the table. And of course, that was the one thing we might have been able to do that would have kept Russia from invading. And I'll just remind everybody that if Russia hadn't invaded, Ukraine would be in much better shape today. I mean, the people who are principally suffering for this diplomatic lapse on our part are the Ukrainians themselves as well. So, you know, I think that the overall handling of this was not great before the war, and I'm actually quite worried now that we are doubling down, that Ukrainians have done better than anybody expected, which is a good thing. But now we're saying, well, the purpose here isn't just to defend Ukraine. The purpose is to inflict a humiliating defeat upon Russia, weaken it over the long term, etc. And what everyone needs to remember is that,

This is a nuclear-armed adversary we're dealing with here, and there are limits to how far you can safely push them. If Russia thinks it is facing a catastrophic defeat, Vladimir Putin thinks he might be ousted. If he thinks that somehow Russia might collapse as well, he might, well, consider escalating because that is what countries do when they are facing the prospect of a catastrophic defeat. I just remind everybody that, you know, back in the Vietnam War, the United States kept not winning, and therefore we kept escalating for a long time. We put in more troops. We started bombing the North. We eventually dropped six million tons of ordinance. And in 1970, we invaded Cambodia, all because we couldn't find a way to win the war.

And we weren't willing to accept, you know, surrender or accept defeat at that point. This is what countries do. They sometimes escalate, and we ought to be very, very careful about how far you want to push Russia. I think it is obviously emotionally satisfying to try and inflict a defeat on a country that has caused this amount of human suffering. But what we really should be trying to do is bring this war to a close. That's because that would be better for the Ukrainians who are also suffering, but also it will be better for a lot of those other countries around the world who are being affected by this,

We're being affected by rising food prices because wheat is not coming out of Russia and not coming out of Ukraine, and that's going to be a problem going forward. There are all sorts of reasons that we want to shut this one down instead of using it as an opportunity to try and punish Russia to the maximum extent possible. That's both dangerous and, in my view, somewhat immoral in terms of the humanitarian consequences for Ukrainians, first and foremost, but also for some others. Now, I'm just, you know, spitballing from the map on my wall here, but I think Vietnam is, what, two, three thousand miles from Russia? We're talking about a war right on Russia's border here. And to me, the lack of diplomacy out of D.C. is just absolutely astonishing that it's not the priority of every single adult in North America right now to force our government to find a way to stop the fighting immediately. ceasefire and work out the problems later, but we can't have a proxy war with H-bomb Russia right on their border? We just can't.

So the one thing the Biden administration has done to try and limit the risk of escalation, of course, is to say that American troops are not going to be used. And that's smart because you don't want Russians and Americans shooting at each other. But, of course, we're doing lots of other things. We are providing them with lots of intelligence. who are providing them with lots of weaponry, and Russians shooting at Americans is not the only reason why this war would escalate. As I said before, it might just escalate because Russia thinks it's losing. Point here, though, is there are several actors involved here, and in order to get

a settlement, you need all of the warring parties or the interested parties to recognize that they're not going to get everything they want, right? That's where compromise comes from. Russia is going to have to realize that it's not going to get a tame Ukrainian satellite, right? Not going to get that. Whatever Putin's hopes were going in, they're not going to be achieved, not all of them. Ukraine is going to have to realize that they may not get Crimea back, right? They may not get full control of the Donbos back. They may not be able to get into NATO after all is said and done.

The United States is going to have to realize that there are limits to the amount of hurt you can put on Russia. not going to get regime change in Moscow. You're not necessarily going to get a catastrophic defeat for the Russian army. You might not even want that, as I said before. So we'd have to recognize that we're not going to get everything we might have wanted either. And it's only at that moment where all the different parties involved realize that they can't get everything they want and they're going to have to cut a deal. You're going to have to give each party enough of what it wants that the deal will stick, that you can actually get at peace. And unfortunately, I don't think we're at that point yet.

I don't think the Ukrainians are there. I don't think the Russians are there. And I don't think we're there. Well, America's a very big dog in this fight. And if they really had a change in policy in D.C. And made that clear to Kiev and made that clear to Moscow, we want peace here and we're serious about talking, then there's a very good chance the Russians would take that seriously, everybody could move toward that position that you're saying they need to be in.

Yeah. I hope that proposition gets tested. Yeah, absolutely. All right, listen, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Okay, good talking to you, Scott. Take care. All right, you guys.

That is Stephen M. Walt, one of the leaders of the realist school of American foreign policy. He teaches at Harvard. He writes at foreign policy.com. And he's the author of the Israel Lobby with John J. Mearsheimer. and the hell of good intentions. And that's it for Anti-War Radio for this morning. Thanks to everybody for listening. I'm Scott Horton.

Check out the full interview archive. 5,700-something interviews now going back to 2003 for you at Scott Horton.org. And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. And I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. Thank you.