Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/9/24 James Carden on the Escalatory Ukraine Aid Package

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

James Carden is back on the show to discuss Washington’s dangerous maneuvers in Eastern Europe. They start with a piece he co-wrote with Katrina Vanden Heuvel in The Nation highlighting the risk of escalation brought about by the recent Ukraine aid package. At the end, Carden draws attention to what Washington is doing in the Caucasus, outside the purview of the headlines. Discussed on the show: “The Ukraine Aid Package Heightens the Risk of Escalation” (The Nation) Lindsey Graham's floor speech on the foreign aid package “How John McCain Turned His Clichés Into Meaning” (New York Times Magazine) “The US secretly sent long-range ATACMS to Ukraine — and Kyiv used them” (Politico) “How Far Trump Would Go” (Time) “Georgia’s ‘Foreign Influence’ Law Is Reasonable” (The American Conservative) “Leading Armenia Down the Primrose Path” (The American Conservative) James Carden is a columnist and senior advisor to the American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA) and a former adviser on Russia policy at the US State Department. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got james cardin from acura which stands for let's get along with russia instead of this and um here he wrote this thing at the nation with katrina van den wevel the publisher of the nation, and we reprinted it at anti-war.com. It's called the Ukraine Aid Package heightens the risk of escalation. Welcome back to the show. James, how you doing, man?

I'm doing good. Thanks for having me back. Very happy to talk to you again. And that's the American Committee on East West Accord or U.S. Russian Accord, right? Because you changed it. Yeah, we renamed it a few years ago, it's the American Committee for U.S. Russia Accord. U.S. Russia Accord. There you go. That's what I meant to say back when I forgot what it was called for a second there. Yeah. Anyways, happy to talk to you again and happy to read your great article here.

You start out in the article, and so let's start out this interview with the Washington, D.C. thing here. Speaker Mike Johnson gave in on the Ukraine aid after months of Republican obstruction. We all knew it couldn't last. So one of the things was Trump said, well, geez, why don't you make it alone? Which, of course, means wink, wink, you know, Gary. guaranteed loan, which means they don't ever have to pay it back. But that helped break the impasse. But also, you talk about how, the CIA or whoever, the National Intelligence Directorate, they took Mike Johnson in the back room and laid down the law and let him know how it really goes.

Is that what happened here? Well, that's what it seems like. According to a very good report from Jonathan Martin in Politico, Martin talked to not only Johnson, but a number of Johnson's colleagues like Michael McCall from the, he's the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a number of others. And Martin noted that they were all saying the same thing when he spoke to them independently one another. And they were using this language that is familiar, will be familiar to you and your listeners. they were referring to a new axis of evil.

But this time, the axis is Russia, China, and Iran. And Johnson, to his credit, said, you know, where's this coming from, guys? And they said, well, you know, we got briefed by the IC, the intelligence community. And, you know, when you get these briefings, you can see that, you know, it's all connected. So basically, the question that Katrina and I, raised in the piece is that it's, you know, very possible that we're once again, just like in the days of W confronting the specter of politicized intelligence, because it seems very likely that Biden sent members of the IC to the hill to scare the hell out of these people. And that's,

that's been something that, you know, administrations have been doing, you know, forever. You know, there's a famous example of a Truman Secretary of State, Dean Atchison, saying, you know, we have to make our case to Congress clearer than truth, which means not true at all. And, you know, they use the privilege of their position in the intelligence community to scare these guys. And that's kind of what it seems like because, you know, they're saying things like, if we don't send this aid package to Ukraine, Putin is not only going to take over the entirety of Ukraine, he's going to roll into Eastern Europe, which is really just complete fantasy.

So anyway, those were the kinds of issues and topics that we raise in the piece. Yeah. And so, any interesting, nobody notices that the propaganda has changed from, but listen, we have to help Ukraine because they can beat. They're going to destroy Russia. They're going to force them out, and including Crimea. They're going to win this war. And now you want to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat here, man, don't do it.

And that's now replaced by, oh, no, Russia's definitely going to win. And if we don't stop them here, they're going to defeat everybody else, too. Right. And it's pure fantasy because, frankly, the first time around the Russians didn't even make get to Kiev. There's very little evidence that they want the lands beyond what are known as the lands of Nova Rosia, which are the traditional, you know, Russian-speaking lands in the south and east of that country. The Russians would be very foolish indeed if they tried to take over the entirety of Ukraine because they would be dealing then with a very fierce insurgency.

So that's not something that analysts think, you know, are on the cards. Certainly people like John Meersheimer, you know, believe that that would be a very, very foolish thing for the Russians to do. There's very little evidence that they would be able to take over the entirety of the country. And there's even less evidence that they want to take on more than Ukraine anyway. They can't and they won't. But, you know, the Biden administration, are, you know, using these scare tactics on these kind of credulous members of Congress to get, to get their way. And that's the thing about it, is how credulous they are.

This is the Speaker of the House, but he didn't spend his weekends reading. He just, like, is out in the park playing ball with the kids or whatever. He didn't know anything about this. He can't put up a resistance, an argument at all against these guys when they come and tell him this stuff. You have to believe this, Mr. Speaker, and he's. I don't know. Okay. Yeah, there seems to be very little in Johnson's background that would indicate that he's

equipped for the job that he has. Yeah. And same goes for all of them, too. I remember, I think it was a big Yemen vote was going on. And Max Blumenthal was asking congressmen on their way to work outside the Capitol, hey, you're a congressman. What do you think about the Yemen bill? And every single one of them was like, what's a Yemen?

What are you talking about? What I'm saying, listen, man, I'm on it. I do tax rules. form. I don't know about that. It's like, well, yeah. Yeah, that's right. I remember that. That's a very max thing to do. And thank God he does it. But that's right. I would be very surprised if you gave a map of Europe, even to your average congressman without the names of the countries and ask them to point out, you know, where Ukraine is, for instance, or where Moldova is, for instance, or, you know, or even getting down into the nitty gritty, asking them to point out, you know,

where you know characters in history are is or or the you know the Luhansk region um i think that there would be a you know a lot of uh non answers or wrong answers um but that's the way the hill operates um you have these people um who don't really know very much and then they're advised by people who seem to know even less yeah well i mean and there's a great example that when Vivek Ramoswamy in the debate asked Nikki Haley to name the provinces in eastern Ukraine that she's ready to fight for and she which was quite a gamble right like she might have read a little something about it you know but he caught her completely flatfooted she couldn't even name Donyetsk you know I didn't know that that's terrific yeah especially considering uh you know

she she was the UN ambassador under Trump yeah that's funny yeah which goes I mean to me like okay granted i got an anti-war bent or whatever but this stuff is interesting anyway like if i was some scumbag senator i would still like even if i wasn't reading antiwar dot com i would want to be reading a little something about this from so i guess i'd read the atlantic or whatever but i would know the names of the provinces in question i'd want to know what's going on you know yeah i mean you have people who do have some knowledge i would wager that someone like let's take like the apex maniac of the united states senate lindsay grant I'm sure that he does know where these places are.

The problem is that he's just so completely unhinged. I mean, did you see his recent floor speech? It was right before the April 23 vote. It's available on YouTube, and it is disturbing. He basically makes the case, the non-existent case, that if we didn't pass the aid packages for Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine, there would be another 9-11. And then his aides put up behind him an enormous picture of the Twin Towers

engulfed in flames on 9-11. I mean, that is the really the cheapest kind of... Wait, he was saying that about Israel or he was saying that about Russian Ukraine? He was making the case that it's all, that it's all tied together. Because, of course, you know, something, something, something Iran with these guys. So, you know, the Russians are getting, you know, Iranian drones and therefore we have, you know, an axis of evil, et cetera, et cetera. That's completely crazy. It always reminds me that time where they were in Iraq or maybe they were like in Kuwait or something doing a PR thing.

But they'd been to Iraq. I think they were actually in Iraq. And John McCain accuses Iran. Oh, this is 07, you know, when they were Cheney and Petraeus were conspiring to try to get us into war with. Iran. And McCain goes out there and goes, Iran is taking al-Qaeda in Iraq. And they're taking them into Iran for training. And they're using them to blow up our guys. And then Joe Lieberman is there. And on Mike, he gets up on his tiptoes and whispers in McCain's ear and says, just say militants, John. Just say militants. Because, of course, the Iranians were backing the soderists

and the Supreme Islamic Council's Bada Brigade and so forth in their war against al-Qaeda in Iraq during that war. And so here's McCain as like the worst hawk in the entire Senate. Like other than Bush and Pearl and Crystal, like he is the guy most responsible for launching that war, tied with Biden, one of the ones most responsible for launching that war. And he doesn't even know who's in the East and who's in the West.

He didn't know the first thing about it. You know? it's the same thing with all of them really you know what am i supposed to say they ask you know yeah i don't think mcaine had much of a reputation as a scholar to begin with yeah and it's not like while he was riding in the limo he was you know asking good questions of his aides either you know what i mean like yeah he just wasn't even interested at all oh not at all yeah no there's a really terrifying piece um a number of years ago towards the end of his life by um mark leboitz from the Times, and he followed McCain around for like a week, and it's just crazy. I mean, the guy

just seemed absolutely off his, off the chain. Oh, I'd like to read that. What was that in? That was in the New York Times? Yeah, it was a New York Times magazine piece. Huh. I know that on his deathbed, he goes, yeah, maybe we shouldn't have done the Iraq War. Like, man, you should just shut up. You don't even have the right to now say that, and he still didn't say he was sorry or anything. Oh, that's interesting. I had no idea that he even did such a thing. Yeah. But it's like, man, you can't take none of that back. As, you know, he was a hawk the whole time for Rock War III as well and every bit of it, you know? It's not like he just helped push it back in 01 and 02 when he was the first one to publicly accuse Saddam Hussein

of doing the anthrax attacks and stuff. Like, come on, man. Oops. On your deathbed, you cry, oops, come on. Anyway, sorry, I'm rambling. How about this? I'll ask you another question. What about what you say here about they were lying about what weapons they were already giving to the Ukrainians here? Yeah. This is another – the media, I would say, in Washington actually had a good week that week because you had Martin's piece and then you had political come out with what really should be a major scandal, but it seemed to have gotten no traction at all, is that Biden has been basically lying to the American people. about what he said he would not send to Ukraine. So there are these attack them, long-range missiles that he and Jake Sullivan repeatedly said, we're not sending them.

And we definitely have told the Ukrainians that we don't condone attacks on Russian territory, and all that went out the window. And actually, they did send them months ago without, without, without informing the public. So there's another question that Katrina and I raised in the piece is, you know, what else are they not telling us? And of course, there's quite a lot that they're not telling us. You know, there's a lot of unanswered questions about Nord Stream, for instance.

I believe that there are a number of unanswered questions about the major terrorist attack that unfolded in Moscow. So there's, you know, they are not being at all forthcoming, and they are risking, you know, a major, major blowup of this thing, which we don't need, and we certainly, we can't win. And I really dearly wish that Biden would pick up the phone and tell French President Macron to cool it with all the tough talk.

You know, we have to get, we have to start seeing things for what they are. And the war is basically lost. We have to sit down with the Russians and figure a way out of this. And escalation is not what is called for. Yeah. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the Institute, and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along.

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isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters August 29th. Get tickets now. I mean, this is the thing is, um, people, People might argue that, look, you can't sell this country out when they're defending themselves. A more powerful country has invaded them. And even if there were some provocations that still, you know, this or that. But to defeat them, we would have to all die, too, in an entire general thermonuclear war. That just happens to be who we're dealing with here. So you could whatever wrong argument you have about invading Iraq,

Iraq really can't hit us back. You know, we might anger some terror is going to hit us later or something, but it's not the same thing here. And so the whole point has always been that this is going to end by negotiation, you know, and it could have ended a long time ago. And so you talk in your article, you got some statistics that just absolutely put the lie to the idea that what America and NATO are doing here is helping Ukraine. we're just not no not at all the country is completely destroyed i mean by any any metric that you look at population gdp you know you you have even according to the bbc ukrainian service 650 000 military aged men have fled the country um so what we have is sort of a similar situation that confronted us in vietnam where you had a quote-unquote ally that really wasn't

willing to actually fight now there have been a lot of you know there are Ukrainians who have fought and fought bravely and lost their lives i don't want to minimize that but 650,000 people of you know military age men have fled that country millions millions more have fled and they're not coming back. So what you have is Ukraine on the road to becoming a rump state. And what's really horrible about the whole thing is that this was really and truly an unnecessary war. This did not have to happen. But we in Washington pushed and pushed and pushed it. And we lie to them. We, as John Meersheimer, likes to say, we led Ukraine down the Primrose path. You know, we made all these fulsome promises.

And basically what happened is that their country is now destroyed. They should have learned the lesson of Georgia in 2008. But we never really seemed to learn from our mistakes. And unfortunately, we're now in the process. This is not noted very much in the press. But we're in the process of trying to lead, you know, we're getting more and more involved in the caucuses now. We're leading Armenia down the same path that we led Georgia and Ukraine. And it's a really dangerous situation.

We seem to be opening up ever more fronts in the new Cold War. we have our fingers in a lot of activity in the in Serbia you know in the caucuses and this stuff is you know there's just no end to it and and it's totally utterly unnecessary and all for the sake of prolonging this zombie 75 year old military alliance it makes no sense and it doesn't make the American people safer. And it certainly doesn't make the Eastern European safer. Yeah. I mean, when you see this guy, Emmanuel Macron, talking all tough, and then the Russians announced that they're going to do some nuclear weapons exercises to make sure they're fresh. I don't really think our security forces have the right to put us in that situation and increase

the risk of thermonuclear war over. Ukraine which is by no stretch of the imagination our responsibility you know it's completely crazy that this is still going on two years into this war and they're the only plan is make sure definitely keep it going past the election and then i guess we'll see how bad ukraine loses after that yeah there's really no end in sight i mean that there is a you know there's a peace conference coming up sponsored by switzerland in the beginning of june but But, you know, you can't really have a real peace conference if you refuse to invite one of the main players in the war, meaning Russia. So, you know, there are all these kind of half steps and headfakes toward.

I mean, what does that even mean at all, James? A peace conference where Russia is not invited. What did they even discuss there? Right. It's just basically they're there once again to hear out the Ukrainians. And Zelensky, who seems to be increasingly, not only authoritarian, but increasingly delusional and indeed in battled in his own country, it'll be very interesting to see how his future unfolds over the next, you know, six to eight months. I get a sense just from what you read that perhaps he is not, you know, he's not long for the job. But we'll have to see, and I think you're sadly correct that the administration is going to keep this thing going, at least through the election.

Then, of course, the big question mark is if the election doesn't go Biden's way and it goes Trump's way, what will he do? And I don't really see a lot of hope that he will do too much different from what what Biden is doing. That is if you go on who is currently advising him. He gave a very long interview in Time magazine for its cover story recently. And it was a lot of words, but he said actually very, very little. So, yeah, the anti, there are very few anti-war forces in Washington, but of course, that's an old story. Yeah, I know that there are headlines that I have saved the tabs somewhere. I'm going to get to them at some point.

I know, but it's another chapter in the intervention in Georgia there, where there are massive protests against another attempt at passing this foreign NGO law. and it's self-explanatory right there who's back in the protests the foreign NGOs and those who are dependent on their money you know that's all it is yeah i mean i would direct um your listeners to a very good piece on that controversy and that piece of legislation by um helen andrews an american conservative oh is that right i actually have your american conservative article in front of me right now that i was about to ask you about but now i'm opening up the homepage in a new tab too. So, um, but Helen makes the, the, the eminently sensible point that, you know, these foreign agent laws, um, are totally sensible. We would, would you want, you know,

the foreign organizations, you know, coming in, coming here telling us, telling us how to, you know, run things, uh, it's crazy. But, you know, this is another ginned up controversy. Um, Basically, the Georgia Dream Party is a, you know, it's like a Georgia first party. There's nothing wrong with that. These people have every right to run their countries the way that they see fit. And if it upsets our bureaucrats at USAID or whatever, well, too bad. Yeah, seriously. And imagine, especially with the track record of especially the Soros NGOs, but a lot of others, too.

the way that they intervene and all the color-coded revolutions and so forth, imagine pretending that all that is the height of legitimacy and anyone trying to stop it are the real enemies of democracy, yeah. Right, exactly. Democracy means America's national interest as defined by whoever happens to be in power in the U.S. government at any given moment. Right. I just can't understand what it is about these laws that upsets these that upsets our governing class so much what exactly i mean besides the fact that a lot of

these people again couldn't find georgia on a map um what it what is really the strategic interests that we have here in tc pipeline these places you know it's the pipeline man where we cut out iran and russia both by taking that oil west to turkey it always comes down to to to energy yeah well and cutting the Russians out that's what it is you know it's not just for the money it's for making sure they can't have it or have control of it and which is by the way it brings up you know if you go back to the war of 08 where the Russians were like 10 miles away from the pipeline they could have just walked right over there and turn the thing off if they'd wanted to and they didn't right they're trying to keep open

the possibility of future relations with us it was after all the georgians that started that war yeah that's right that's right confirmed by a very in-depth report issued by the by the european union but again that is something that uh never gets mentioned right yep all right so um listen tell me more about armenia and what's going on there i know that last fall America, and I guess the rest of the planet turned away as they finished finally being cleansed out of Nagorno-Karabakh there at the hands of the Azerbaijani's. That last little bit of them there. But I don't know the rest of – I lost track of who's in power in Armenia and whether the Americans are for them or again. Yeah.

So the prime minister, Paschignon, is a basically seen. by correctly in my view by many of his fellow countrymen as a American puppet and he has done his very best he came to power in in and around 2018-19 and in something called the velvet revolution and you know this guy is an old crony of George Soros which is always trouble and he has been doing his best to alienate Armenia's traditional guarantor of security, which is Russia. And that pleases the American elites, but it puts them in a very difficult, it puts his people in a very difficult position because, you know, it was the Russian peacekeepers who, for a very

long time, kept their disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabha from being wiped out by the Azerbaijani's. Well, thanks to Paschignan's determination to alienate the Russians, that's exactly what happened. And so you had an instance last September of ethnic cleansing of that republic, and it is no more. and the Azerbaijani's have been working they've been they've been funded their excuse me their military has been supplied by the Israelis and they work hand in hand with the Turks to squeeze to squeeze Armenia and Paschenaan just had to give up a number of villages on the border so it looks to some like there may well be you know another invasion and they're going to take another bite out of that country yeah because there's a piece of Azerbaijan in Armenia's west where they're separates

their own little Nagorno Karabakh on the Turkish Armenian border there so they want a corridor to it and to take all of that but you're saying that by understanding right that because Because America has, you know, kind of pulled this guy away from Russia's orbit, that means that Russia's not there as the bigger brother to him to the Azerbaijani's that they better not try it because Russia would protect Armenia. So that's sort of what's given Azerbaijan license to go ahead and now cleanse Nagorno-Karabakh last fall and look at, I always forget the name of it, that little enclave in the West there. well that's exactly right and that's that's what that is exactly what's happening and of course um you know traditionally it was the russians and the iranians who were the guarantors of armenian security but this guy uh wants to cozy up to the americans and the best way to do that is to alienate russia and to alienate iran but he's doing it at a terrible cost man ain't that's something

my book I got a right. There's a lot of James Cardin in my book, you know? You're good on things. I'm like, when you said that about the EU investigation, I'm like, do I have that? I think I do, but I'm going to make sure. But anyway, so listen, I want to ask you, too, before we go. Wait, what time is it? How much time do I have? Oh, I got to go. That's not fair. I wanted to ask you about this other article. Well, listen, everybody, James writes all this great stuff at TAC, the American conservative magazine as well. And as I say, he's at Accura, which is The American Committee on East-West Accord. And wait, no, I said it wrong.

That's the old name. The American Committee on Russia Accord, right? Yeah, U.S. Russia Accord. God, I'm terrible. Visit us at usurusciousCord.org. Yes, exactly. And writes regularly at the nation as well. All right, great.

Thank you so much, James. Appreciate you, man. Thanks, Scott. Take care. The Scott Horton Show, an anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM. in LA. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.