Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/22/23 Kyle Anzalone on Ukraine’s Counteroffensive and Blinken’s Trip to China

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

Kyle Anzalone was back with Scott for Antiwar Radio today to talk Ukraine and China. They start with Ukraine. Anzalone gives an update on the state of Ukraine’s much-hyped counteroffensive. They then talk about what came out of Anthony Blinken’s trip to China and examine the reaction from the American right.  Discussed on the show: Scott’s interview with Daniel Davis “Is Putin Bluffing on Redlines? Ask Putin” (Libertarian Institute) “America and China are preparing for a war over Taiwan” (The Economist) Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman. Follow him on Twitter @KyleAnzalone_ This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, June 22nd, 2023. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all, welcome to the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of Anti-War.com. And I'm the editor of the new book, Hotter Than the Sun. Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. You can find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them now, going back 20 years, at

Scott Horton.org, YouTube.com slash Scott Horton show, and really all the video sites on the internet have the full archive there. And a little something extra special in the last week. I posted a 13-hour audio podcast special on the web. Waco Massacre 30 years ago called the Waco tragedy. You can find that at Scott Horton.org. All right, so I'm here live in person with the Institute's news editor and anti-war.com's opinion editor, Kyle Anselone and Kyle, I've been very busy lately,

so I need you to catch us all up, including me on the bad news. Welcome to show, sir. How are you? Doing great, Scott. Thanks for having me back on the show today. great to have you here so let's start with the most important news out of russia and ukraine if you could please sir so scott the counteroffensive is well underway and it doesn't seem like it's going well i think ukraine is now acknowledging that they started their counteroffensive on june 4th i think it actually

looks like the operations started a few days before that but in that amount of time they have not made very much progress. And now we're hearing from the leadership of Ukraine that Zelensky and the Ukrainian defense minister that the gains aren't coming as fast as they have predicted. The defense minister tried to explain this away by saying we shouldn't expect similar success as we saw last fall and that weather conditions are playing a part in it. But at the same time, Scott, it doesn't look like as far as South Front watching how the maps are updated every day that there's very much going on as far as battlefield goes. And in fact, the Ukrainian deputy defense minister has admitted

that Russians are starting to launch offensive in certain areas and have retaken a few villages, are taken a few additional villages, as well as Ukraine making some minor gains along the front where they're carrying out some of their operations. And now this is an attempt by them to essentially sever what's called the land bridge in the province of Proja between the Crimean Peninsula and the Donbass, correct?

Well, it seems like that was the initial plans for the counteroffensive would have been to try to sever what they're calling a land bridge there, Scott. But it doesn't seem like there was really any chance that they were going to take that much territory. As the Ukrainian officials admitted, the battlefields where Russia is are very heavily fortified and extremely mined. And so even using a lot of NATO equipment,

The Washington Post covered this 47th mechanized brigade that they created for Ukraine. They trained all the troops. They armed all those troops. And from what we've seen from the battlefield, they've taken pretty significant losses, including leopard tanks. Yeah, so tell us more about that. Of course, it was very hyped up that the Europeans with American permission and support were giving all this new equipment and especially these new tanks to the Ukrainians.

Did they make any difference at all? well the as far as the battlefield goes looking at how the lines have changed sky it doesn't seem like they have russia seems to have been well prepared for the western weapons coming in again a lot of mines very heavily fortified and then i think the ukrainians are finding a lot of trouble when they attack and their attacks are repelled and they tried to retreat back russia is using some long-range deployable mines to make a retreat essentially impossible because they had to then retreat through a minefield and we've seen it analyst, Douglas McGregor and Daniel Davis, who are, you know, military, former military

officials themselves in the U.S., and they, you know, even say that there really hasn't been any gains for the Ukrainians, and McGregor adds that if Ukraine wants to continue to launch and push the counteroffensive, then it's going to cost them defensive positions in other places. He says, Ukraine does have a lot of troops in reserve, but those troops need to. to be there in order to defend Ukraine, say, from a Russian attack coming through Belarus or something along those lines. It's anti-war radio.

I'm Scott Horton talking with Kyle Anzlone from anti-war.com. So what are the Americans saying about this, Kyle? So we're not hearing a lot from the White House as far as it goes. The Ukrainians prior to the counteroffensive told everybody to be quiet about it. And then just this week, we've gotten some statements from Zelensky saying that it's not going as well as they would like. All right. And now, when I spoke with Daniel Davis a couple of weeks ago, he was saying that

win, lose or draw, this is essentially the last stand for the Ukrainian military because it's going to take so many of the divisions that they've held in reserve up until now in order to make any gains at all that even if they were successful and somehow, for example, marched all the way to the Azov coast and severed that land bridge that they wouldn't be able to hold it. They'd be surrounded and outnumbered and it would take essentially everything they've got to do that. So is anyone, you know, anonymous officials talking to the Washington Post or anyone saying that they acknowledge that reality that this war is going to be over sooner than later and our side ain't winning? Scott, that really doesn't seem to be the case. Right now, the NATO

alliances in the midst of training Ukrainians on F-16s that they plan to deliver to Kiev for the Nets counteroffensive whenever they're planning on launching that. The U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Lincoln, along with the U.K. Foreign Minister, James Claverly, came out very strongly and said that, you know, there will be another counteroffensive. And there have been some comments mostly from Republicans and even some, you know, fairly establishment Republicans who have said that future support for Ukraine is contingent upon success on the battlefield. But, you know, we just saw this week, Scott, that apparently the Pentagon says, oh, we have major six billion dollar accounting error. So now we have six million more billion worth of funds that we could use

to arm Ukraine. And so this seems to be able to put off as soon, how soon they need congressional support, maybe to make it a little bit after this failed counteroffensive. But it doesn't seem like there's going to be a lot of resistance in Congress to passing another A package. So I had spent the arms to continue to flow and that means the fighting will continue to go on. I should also add here too that from the White House's perspective, Scott, according to the New York Times, they wrote an article last month kind of detailing the debate among administration officials. And administration officials, some of them thought, oh, if Ukraine takes a significant amount of territory, then what their goal really is is to negotiate with Russia, come to some kind of settlement that I guess would

include seeding some Russian, Ukrainian territory to Russia. But there's also people within the White House who look at it and say, well, if Ukraine has a successful counteroffensive, then that means we actually need to arm them to carry out another one. Right. Like you, why would you stop while you're winning? Right. So put them in a position of strength that we can't ever really get them in before we can compromise. But actually, if we can put them in that position of strength, then we also should not compromise then either. Sounds about right. So now, going back a year,

Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, told the Washington Post he had these various rules for this engagement. And rule number two was keep the entire conflict contained within the borders of the nation state of Ukraine. In other words, America will not be supporting and, in fact, would be discouraging Ukraine

from attacking inside Russia and taking the war to Russia. since we are so heavily implicated in the war. And help remind me, Kyle, do I remember right that Biden himself and his entire government swore on and off the record that they were not going to do anything so crazy as to give the Ukrainians F-16s

that could be used for launching attacks against targets inside Russia or anything with the range that could threaten Russia because that would lead straight to World War III. Isn't that what the President of the United States himself said a year ago? Yeah, Scott. And yet they've moved and crossed so many lines that Biden said they wouldn't cross. And it looks like they're moving closer to saying the attack them.

These are missiles for the Heimar launchers that rather than the ammunition the U.S. is currently giving Ukraine, these rockets are going to have a range of about 200 miles versus 50 miles. So that's a pretty significant step up. But additionally, the U.S. has endorsed the U.K. giving Ukraine the storm shadow missiles, and these have a range of about 200 miles as well and are air fired. And along with that, Scott, we now know that the U.S. military equipment has flown from Kiev into the hands of paramilitaries fighting on the side of Kiev, and this includes the Russian Volunteer Corps, which is a gang of neo-Nazis,

and they're carrying out cross-border raids into Russia. Now, Kiev tries to maintain, oh, we're not backing these and things like that. But in reality, they are. And there was a former Ukrainian official who recently said that Ukraine is actually looking to step up support for those forces carrying out operations inside a Russian territory. And I'm sorry, what's the footnote for that last assertion that they said, I guess probably unnamed sources, said that they want to support more of these raids? It was a

former Ukrainian intelligence official who was speaking with Newsweek. Incredible. I mean, it's pretty obvious. It should be right that if this was just a war between Russia and Ukraine, then it wouldn't be any of our business to tell Ukraine that they have no business

attacking inside Russia. Russia is certainly attacking inside Ukraine and not just in the borders of the states, the provinces they've annexed either. And yet, we are completely and totally implicating this, the U.S. government and the NATO military alliance up to our eyeballs. And that was, you know, the administration recognized that explicitly a year ago and said that's why we have to just focus on defeating Russia inside Ukraine and driving them out of Ukraine. And the idea that we

would sponsor cross-border attacks was absolutely verboten. So as you said, it's just a slippery slope. They keep moving the line. They keep bending the rules. And then more and more they're just breaking them. We saw, what, six weeks ago or less, four weeks ago, there was a drone attack on the Kremlin, which seemed to be more symbolic than a legitimate assassination attempt. But imagine if there had been a Russian-sponsored state attack on the White House and anything approaching a similar set of circumstances. We'd be on DefCon 1. And it's really just incredible how far they're willing to push this. thing. Yeah, and Scott, can I just mention there that the White House seems to be taking basically

anytime Russia doesn't nuke Ukraine or try to maybe carry out of assassination strike on Zelensky, if Russia isn't taking a significant escalation, the White House views, whatever they do as, oh, see, we're not crossing Russia's red lines by giving Ukraine longer range weapons, advanced tains, planning to send them as its teens, when Russian officials have made it very clear that know we're going to take more Ukrainian territory if you give them longer range weapons. Additionally, just today we have an article out at the Institute by Ted Snyder where he details how Russia has actually taken quite a few steps and made significant escalations in response to the U.S. crossing Russian red lines.

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All right, now let's switch gears because I know the Cold War against China never sleeps either. We recently had the Secretary of State travel to Beijing, but that didn't all. So catch us up on diplomacy with China. So for about a month now, Scott, the Biden administration has been putting out that they had spent the diplomatic situation with Beijing to improve. This was first facilitated by William Burns, the CIA director, who was sent to China by Biden and paved the way for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to make his trip. So I think a couple of very interesting parts of this got are one,

Biden is using Antony Blinken to try to reign for diplomacy, which is a very interesting role for the CIA director. But I think as I mentioned on this show before, I think that Blinken is one of the few officials in the Biden administration that cares about diplomacy whatsoever. I'm sorry, you keep saying Blinken, but you mean Burns, the CIA director. Yes. Yeah, William Burns, the CIA director. As opposed to the Secretary of State, Blinken, who hates diplomacy.

Correct. Sorry about that. Yeah. So we have Burns that's pushing diplomacy. Now, this paid the way for Blinken's trip. And China was very unenthusiastic about Blinking coming. There was a lot of notes how there wasn't anybody to greet him at the airport. And the whole tone of China around the tots was, I think, very, negative. You know, they said if the U.S. is willing to change their policy and things like that, then things could get better. From the American side, they're touting this as a huge victory towards de-escalation, but it's pretty clear, Scott, that nobody within the Biden administration

really wants to de-escalate, and they face challenges among the entire American political consensus. You recently had Anthony Blinken state that the U.S. does not support Taiwanese independence, decades long American policy and at least on Twitter this absolutely blew up among you know America's political right as oh my God look at blinking going to Beijing and giving to China Taiwan right now I happen to say something completely reasonable and not inflammatory about the situation and my mentions went completely straight to hell for under the exact same circumstances that you described, but the American right believes that Taiwan has been a sovereign and independent

nation and recognized as such up until the other day. And now Biden, the sellout trader, bribed, you know, it's just like the Russiagate conspiracy, only for Republicans. Biden has been bribed by the Chinese to now sell the Taiwanese out by adopting this new policy of strategic ambiguity and one China. So could you please take people on a little bit of a history lesson here, Kyle Anselawn from anti-war.com and help explain exactly the difference between a radical revolution in American affairs on this question versus, say, simply restating what was supposed to be the status quo. Yeah. So from the Knits and Eras, Scott, the U.S. has recognized that China and Taiwan are part of the same political entity and adopted a policy where they said they're

not going to explicitly say that they will defend Taiwan if it is attacked by China. but they're not going to say they won't either. And this had a kind of a two-prong approach. It made sure that Taipei didn't declare independence, and it also deterred Beijing from attacking Taiwan. Now, Biden has significantly walked away from this and has asserted, I believe, four times now, and at least twice those assertions were backed by other members of his White House.

So these aren't just goofy old Biden making gaffes and not understanding American foreign policy. He is saying that the, U.S. would defend, so abandoning the strategic ambiguity that the U.S. had for so many years in adopting a policy of outright saying that we're going to defend Taiwan, essentially as if it was Ukraine or another member of the NATO alliance. And so, you know, this is a significant escalation and changed in American policy. And yet you have this hysteria on the American right that Joe Biden is somehow going to sell out, you know, the American people to China. And it's reminiscent.

isn't in ways of Russia gate where you had all this hysteria that Trump was selling out the country to Vladimir Putin, that he was a traitor to his country, that he was controlled by the Kremlin. And in reality, Trump's Ukraine policy and policy towards Russia was so aggressive that it, you know, took us right to the doorstep of war in Ukraine, which Biden walked us right through. It really is a tragedy to see just the level of ignorance and miss and even dis-understanding of people's refusal to understand this and to see the American right, which has been somewhat reformed on account of being absolutely burned by their faith in George W. Bush and his wars, and they oppose the war in Ukraine, where you do have a major

power crossing an international border and invading another sovereign nation. They don't want to intervene in that, but they want to intervene between China and a renegade county in what is still a frozen but civil war wholly within the territory of one nation state. It's like the difference between Iraq War I, where Iraq invaded Kuwait, when James Baker told them to, and say the war in Serbia, where Bill Clinton bombed Serbia in Serbia in order to break off the province of Kosovo something like that so here the republicans are basically willing to go with the bill clinton standard on china but not the bush senior standard on ukraine so their position is completely muddled and ignorant and makes no sense and could help lead us into a hydrogen bomb war

and you know what they say to me when i say this to them kyle is they say yeah but scott horton I just think you don't understand the importance of those microchips. Yeah, and there's actually some really good analysis on this by Doug Bondow, who's, you know, with the Cato Institute, going into how it, there's ways for these microchips to be made in other countries, and the level of dependence on the Taiwanese microchips is nowhere near the level that they claim. But, you know, even if it was, Scott, a nuclear war with China, it doesn't quite matter how many microchips Taiwan is producing after that. And seriously, there are no scenarios that any reasonable person could imagine where we fight a war with China over Taiwan and America wins and wins so decisively that Taiwan then is able to declare independence and remains independent and sovereign. We have a war with China over Taiwan. Possibly we all die, but many. many, many thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of people will die, and then we'll lose anyway, and Taipei will go to China anyway.

The whole thing is completely crazy, but I guess it sells a lot of boats and planes. You know, our colleague at the Institute, Connor Freeman, has been collecting and writing up these statements by American military officials about how absolutely inevitable they see this military conflict being, you know, they're not shy at all about. It almost reminds me the weekly standard in the 1990s or something talking about Iraq, the economist headline last week. Both sides are preparing for war. Is it really that blatant? Are we, is anyone trying to steer us off of this course? I guess you mentioned William Burns. The head of the CIA is, you know, breaking a little ground here, making progress. But then you have Biden spouting off.

and insulting and degrading chairman she the next day, right? Like how severely do you think that that undermined the progress that Burns and Blinken may have made there? Yeah, it seems pretty significant, Scott. And this is a problem with the Biden administration overall. You know, William Burns is the State Department official

back then who wrote the memo outlining how Ukrainian membership in NATO is a red line for Russia. And this isn't just about Vladimir Putin. This is the consensus in the Kremlin is what William Burns points out. And yet William Burns is in the Biden White House as the Biden administration is refusing to negotiate with Russia over Ukrainian membership. And we have U.S. government officials who have come out. And they have said that they didn't take Russia seriously on that point.

They said they were willing to negotiate with Russia on points that they thought, Russia was serious about, and one of those was not Ukrainian membership into NATO. So even if Burns is maybe acting as Biden's, you know, personal ambassador to, you know, these different countries, it's pretty clear that his views are largely marginalized in the White House and whether that's because the president is incompetent or Lincoln or somebody else is the one truly running things, no matter what, it doesn't seem like there's anybody really interest in the escalation. And this, again, I think is very much like the Ukraine situation where you have China very clearly laying out that they have a red line on Taiwan and they're willing to

fight over it. And the White House just refuses to take it seriously. Yeah, I remember what about a year ago, Michelle Flournoy, who was in line to be Secretary of Defense if Hillary Clinton had won and who had been Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy under Barack Obama implementing the Afghanistan war surge in 2009 through 12 there. She said, well, look, it's true that the Chinese sea-skimming supersonic anti-ship missiles that Israel gave them our blueprints for have a longer range than, she didn't mention that part, have a longer range than our F-18s. In other words, our aircraft carriers are useless, even if we steam them all over there as fast

as we can. they won't be able to get within range airplane range of Taiwan to make a difference so she said well would just have to build a bigger fleet of B1 bombers then with the goal being to sink and destroy

the entire Chinese Navy in 72 hours and so I'm not sure if she got money directly from Northrop Grumman for that particular statement but that's pretty much how it works and that seems to be the mindset and this goes something I guess we can wrap up on this topic here we have a few minutes

about it's sort of the unreality of this discussion the same as we've seen with the discussion surrounding the conflict with Russia in Eastern Europe where it just doesn't pay as a think tanker to write an article that

says well both sides got nukes so we can't fight because you just can't get paid to write a paper like that and so instead we have this massive community of foreign policy experts who write constantly about conflict with Russia and China where they essentially argue a world where there are no nuclear weapons. Sometimes they don't mention their existence at all

and act like we could sink the Chinese Navy in 72 hours without them nuking Honolulu, which we would not be able to prevent. And then they just act like it's normal. But I wonder for all the discourse about conflict with China that you've been reading lately. Is anybody bringing up the fact that 300 nukes should be enough to deter us from this posture? Not really, Scott. In most of the comparisons when it comes to the China policy and what to do about Taiwan, those conversations in the White House, they're saying, well, we could do Taiwan like we did Ukraine. And so I think that's really what they're looking at. And again, you know, anytime they escalate in their support for Kiev and Moscow carries out an escalation, say,

bombing campaign of Ukrainian infrastructure. In the White House, they do not care about Ukraine or Ukrainian lives. So they don't care if Russia continues to just pound Ukraine with bombs and escalate the war in that way. As long as Russia doesn't carry out a nuclear attack, the White House is going to pretend like the Kremlin isn't escalating. And so I think it's going to be a very similar discussion in the White House when it comes to Taiwan because all the officials are saying that these two situations are very similar yeah i could see that and it makes sense that their argument would be that jesus russia is having this hard of a time in ukraine next door by land imagine what a tough time we could give the chinese trying to invade by sea and then but again they

just pretend that somehow escalation to real major power war between us and them would stay off the table because the consequences are too unthinkable but they're willing to push the line so much further than they have been before. But let me ask you this lastly. Does the Chinese betray an intention to invade Taiwan short of an independence declaration from the Taiwanese provoking them to do and so? I don't know how clear, at least as far as I've seen, I haven't seen Beijing be explicitly clear saying it would take an outright declaration of independence.

My guess is that Beijing probably sees what happened in Ukraine and how the U.S. made Ukraine a member of NATO without actually formally emitting Ukraine into the alliance. And they're concerned about that. The U.S. puts a massive amount of weapons on the Taiwanese island and the government starts really flaunting China and maybe not outright saying that they're independent, but taking steps that may, you know, act like an independent country. So I know China has put up a lot of effort to try to prevent Taiwan from engaging in international bodies that are supposed to be for sovereign nations. And so if the U.S. starts pushing Taiwan to

more of these bodies, then Beijing could say, well, this is de facto independence, and we have to do something about this. And the Beijing has made it very clear that they believe if de facto, you know, if independence is declared, or if the U.S. crosses the red line here, then they will take action. Yep. And then just like with Russia, they'll say, see, we told you they're aggressive. All right, well, that is Kyle Anzloan from anti-war.com. Thank you so much for joining us again on the show today, Kyle. Thanks for having me, Scott. And that is Anti-War Radio for today.

I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of Hotter Than the Sun, well, editor of Hotter Than the Sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. Find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them now at Scott Horton.org, and sign up for the podcast feed there as well. And I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.