Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/27/21 James Carden on AUKUS, China and NATO Infighting

Episode Date: October 1, 2021

Scott is joined by James Carden to discuss a possible silver lining to the new and unnecessary anti-China pact between Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. (AUKUS). Tensions broke out within NATO after France was unexpectedly cut off from a previously negotiated submarine deal with Australia. Carden thinks some infighting can do some good if it leads to the end of this out-of-date military alliance that threatens peace rather than preserving it.  Discussed on the show: Video of Mearsheimer appearing to threaten Australia The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John Mearsheimer “NATO Needs to Adapt Quickly to Stay Relevant for 2030, Report Urges” (New York Times) James Carden is the executive editor for the American Committee for US-Russia Accord and former adviser on Russia policy at the US State Department. He is a contributing writer at The Nation. 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; Dröm; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee 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

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of antivore.com, author of the book, Pools 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 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot four you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show hey you guys introducing james cardin from the american committee for u.s russia accord they changed the name so they could make a cool acronym out of it acura And the point being that instead of having a Cold War and then maybe a really, really, really hot war with Russia, we should get along instead. Welcome back. How are you doing, James?

I'm good. And fortunately, we haven't gotten sued from the car company yet. That's very good to know. Maybe you can get them to sponsor your efforts, you know. That would be nice. Russia's a big market there, you know, sell some Accurus instead of exploding people. Yeah, anyway. What a constant. Yeah.

Hey, listen, so we got this new thing, Ocas, speaking of weird acronyms. And this is the new alliance between the U.S., the UK, and Australia. And, well, just as an aside, I wanted to point out, I don't know if you ever saw this, but there's a great clip of John Mearsheimer giving a speech in Australia that Caitlin Johnstone tweeted out last week. And Mearsheimer is saying, you better line up with us or you guys are in big trouble.

And we'll never forget it. And if you don't line up with us, then that's the same as the lying with China against us. And you'll make an enemy out of us and all these things. And so John Stone says, listen, Australia is not joining up with the U.S. to protect itself from China. Australia is joining up with the U.S. to protect itself from the U.S., which sure seemed right to me. So then that means as part of that, they have joined up this new alliance, or a renewed alliance, I guess, with the United States and Britain. And at the expense of the French, who were lined up to sell some submarines to Australia, and I guess right before the deal was to go through, they made this change. And then the change comes with the Australians buying nuclear-powered submarines from the United States instead of the first.

French. So that's the background, but then you've got this great piece here at USRussiaacord.org about the silver lining that, hey, great, tensions inside NATO, right? Maybe this would be productive toward ending America's European empire? Well, that's sort of the hope. That's, I speculate that Macron's anger over the deal of being betrayed by his Australian partners and being really kept in the dark by the U.S. and UK will have him rethink and enact on his often expressed reservations about the NATO alliance. Macron is a rare figure in the West in that he actually seems inclined not to go with the talking points with regard to NATO.

And he has previously described the alliance as having experienced brain death, among other things. And Macron's views on NATO are not dissimilar to those of his kind of his presidential model in France. And that would be President Charles de Gaulle, who was such a critic of NATO that he threw all of the NATO forces out of his country in the mid-60s. One would hope that this incident, embarrassing as it was to the French, that perhaps it will spur Macron to rethink the value of that alliance, which is long outlived, it's sell by date, if you will. Yeah, got that right. Well, so let me ask you this. When France was selling these subs to the Australians, was there a narrative that, yeah, this is to protect you in the new Cold War with China or just, hey, you guys want to buy some submarines and we'll do a deal, but without the kind of global foreign policy kind of thing going on to? Yeah, I didn't.

It didn't seem to me that they were selling submarines and a military alliance designed to insert. circle and isolate China. But it seems as though the UK and American subs did come with those strings very much attached. And so the press conference that was held between Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morris, and the buffoonish, the Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, in our own, America's granddad, Joseph Biden, they all, the theme of the announcement really was this new so-called strategic alliance in the Indo-Pacific. And I might be mistaken about this. I'm not sure that they actually said the word China during the rollout, but clearly that's what it is

and foreign. I'm glad that you brought up John Meersheimer at the top because his book, the tragedy of great power politics, ends with a long discussion of the rise of China. And in a nutshell, Meersheimer, who is always worth listening to, posits that China's rise will not and cannot be peaceful. Not so much because they have designs on world domination, but he fears America's reaction to it far more than what the Chinese are actually up to. So he really pends the, if it's not going to rise peacefully, his thesis is that it's going to be because of the overreaction in Washington. And I think that the creation of Ocus is bearing that out.

So in other words, that clip of his speech, he's basically saying that America is such an irrational and dangerous creature. You Australians should help me calm it down by joining its alliance now so that it doesn't feel so insecure about China. to maybe help to keep the peace rather than make matters worse. Yeah, I think that's the way I would read it.

I hadn't heard, I've seen that clip before, but... I need to... Yeah, I mean, he's being pretty harsh in that clip, but I could see how it, you know, it's not the whole context. I haven't seen the whole speech, but... In a way, the way he's talking, he's speaking for the United States of America,

but that could be just like a rhetorical thing rather than these, you know, really just saying, you boys better fall in line say so on behalf of the u.s kind of thing you know it's yeah but i could see what you mean um now well it's interesting too and i wonder about whether you hear much of this about all the china's problems i mean they're building up their naval power in the south china sea and all of this but um you know they have all kinds of economic problems uh as we're seeing right now with the beginning of the collapse of their housing market and things like this and

You know, I already knew this, but I hadn't really thought about it in this way. I keep bringing this up. I did a panel discussion that was hosted or whatever, moderated by Grover Norquist at Freedom Fest a couple of months ago. And he rattled off all of the countries on China's border or, you know, surrounding them, right near them. You know, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, well, Taiwan, for that matter. Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia and Thailand and India and Pakistan and Russia and I'm probably leaving out a couple. You know, we have Canada and Mexico and water. They've got like 10 countries on their border, eight countries or something on their border that they have to have a separate

foreign policy for each one to try to figure out, you know, how to balance all these interests. And as I rattle all those names off, if I were to ask you which one of those countries is Taiwan or is China going to invade and conquer? Taiwan is probably the only one, right? Oh, I left out Outer Mongolia. Like, nobody thinks they're going to roll into the stands in Central Asia. Nobody thinks they're going to invade Japan or Korea or Vietnam or any of these things. They might take Taiwan, which would be, you know, a huge flashpoint in danger of war.

But it seems to me like the whole dangerous rise of China in the first place is vastly. Overblown. It's sort of like based on the presumption that they're going to continue with the exact same level of growth that they've had since 1990 to now forever without problems or something. And that they share America's ambitions for global dominance for that matter. Well, that's the key. I mean, you were saying that no one really believes that, you know, China is set to roll through the stands. I'm fairly certain that we could find some maniacs on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington. We're all. the think tanks are located and find a bunch of people who actually believe that or making their living not pretending that China is some sort of military, military threat in the region, just as a lot of of these people have made their careers on pretending that the Russians are about to roll through Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland, and the rest of it. So there is this kind of conflation with their economic rise and their supposed geopolitical designs. These people seem to forget that China has one foreign military base, right?

We have roughly 750, by some estimates, maybe even 800 military bases worldwide. They have one. and it is in Djibouti. So, you know, the arguments are, I find them fairly unpersuasive, which isn't to say that the Chinese are not bad actors in certain discrete areas. They are, but the kind of containment 2.0 new Cold War approach towards China seems silly because it depends upon the cooperation of a lot of those countries that you just named, taking part, those countries on China's border. The problem is that those very same countries do the vast amount of trade with China, right?

So it would be sort of an unprecedented historical occurrence where you have a country reliant on, you know, you have a country like Vietnam that is almost completely reliant on trade with China. But then they're going to decide to join a military alliance aimed against China, right? It doesn't seem like it's been really well thought out, but that isn't surprising, given Washington's proclivity, not to think things out. Right. All right, sorry, hang on a second, important business here. I was telling my friend, man, you drink too much.

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during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jack Kennedy. It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's Road to World Empire. The War State by Mike Swanson. Find it in the right-hand margin at Scott Horton.org. You know, it's funny, too, I mean, I guess if you start out with the premise of paranoia, then you go, oh, no, the Belt and Road Initiative. China is going to conquer all Eurasia. They're going to take their million-man army and they're just going to march it west

and they're going to end up ruling all the way from Shanghai to Lisbon or whatever. That's the plan for the road, but it seems like, I mean, geez, if you just look at a map of the world or a globe with the proper proportions and everything, China's huge, but it's still only, what, like a eighth of Eurasia or a fifth of it or something like that? That's a lot of Eurasia to conquer if you're China. And it seems like if you really want to build a road and a highway and a fiber optic line and everything all the way from Shanghai to Lisbon, that you're going to have to kiss everybody's ass all the way to Portugal rather than threatening them and pointing rifles at them. Because that's a lot of road to secure, man.

You're going to need friends to help keep the peace on your road. Or else, you know, who's going to protect the quickie mart on the side of the road from the highway robbers, you know? Well, right. I mean, their foreign policy seems to be based more on soft power and more on economics and independence theory, right? They seem to believe that the more trade that they do with countries, the better their relations will be, and perhaps the more leverage they have. They don't really seem to buy into this Anglo-American. tradition of hard power, military invasion, regime change above all. And, you know, this strategy of isolating them and containing them is in the process of backfiring fairly spectacularly because the policy of containing and isolating and making into a pariah state, the Russian Federation has driven the Russians into the arms of the Chinese and these are historically adversarial states and now with the

dual containment policy what we're in the process of making is a very solid alliance a pragmatic one between Russia and China and I'm not sure that that's something um that um will read read down to our benefit yeah i mean this is something i remember talking about with chalmers johnson back 15 years ago or something was here the europeans were you know launching this giant weapon sale uh you know a whole program of weapon sales to china and chalmers johnson said you know in the cold war this was our ultimate nightmare would be a you know paris berlin Moscow, Beijing Axis, right? This is the worst thing that could

possibly happen. Now, this is what we're doing with, you know, the American and Anglo Alliance essentially attacking Iraq in the way that they were doing then and the way Rumsfeld was you know, alienating old Europe in favor of New Europe, as he called it there, you know, promoting the

East over the Old West. And, I mean, certainly the Sino-Soviet split and its exploitation by Nixon, Beckfield, 50 years ago was regarded as this brilliant achievement, right? That, you know, the foreign policy establishment had mistakenly, accidentally on purpose, continued to believe that Beijing and Moscow were eye to eye on everything for all of that time since Mao had taken power when it really wasn't true. And all it took was a little bit of creativity on Kissinger's part, and they were

able to not just exploit, but really accentuate that split between Russia and China. And, It seems like now, in their arrogance, essentially, they're just pushing them all back together again. Well, forget the Europeans for now, but especially the Russians and the Chinese, when, if you asked Henry Kissinger, we should be choosing one over the other to balance against the other, right? There was even at one point Trump said, you know, I went and talked to Henry Kissinger, and he told me that we should be leaning toward Russia to balance against China right now. And then everyone decided, no, Trump is a secret, you know, FSB spy is the far more likely explanation for him saying nice things about Russia. When really that was what he was being told by, you know, the grayest of graybeards is that we should not be, you know, hyping up our Cold War against both at the same time. Because the last thing in the world we want is for them to put aside all differences and join back together again against us, which I got to say I don't care either way, but you know what I mean. Right. I mean, that's right. So that's the danger of the dual containment policy that Washington insists on, regardless of party. They insist on following. And there are very few voices here, maybe outside of, I don't know, Rand Paul, perhaps on the right.

And then on the left, someone like Rokana and Barbara Lee, who are realistic enough and perhaps, you know, wise enough to be warning against this pursuit of a new Cold War, a two-front Cold War. That seems to be all the rage right now in Washington. And by the way, I should be clear, when I say I don't care, because they're not coming here, right? If they lie against us, all that would mean is they'd be limiting our government's influence in the old world, which I don't object to, because America shouldn't have any influence in the old world anyway. So that's all I'm saying there. It's not like they're a real threat.

If it came to a war, then, yeah, I'm on America's side, but you know what I mean? Right. No, I mean, it's, it goes back again to, to Meersheimer, right? Meersheimer's thesis is that China's goal really is to become a regional hegement, right? And that the United States, for whatever reason, reasons of ideology, mainly I think, will not allow that to happen, but I don't see any real reason why we shouldn't. And we're obviously, for the past, oh, 30 years, we've been trying to become a global hegeman, but that has proved to be, you know, utterly impossible.

But we certainly, in the absence of that, will always be the regional hegeman. And, you know, the European Union and Russia right now are in a competition in the United States is deeply involved in this competition. So you will be the regional hegeman there. And obviously, China is going to emerge as its own regional leader. And there should be very multipolarity where you have a world with different spheres of influence and different poles should not be something that we are, that we should be afraid of. But it terrifies all those people who I mentioned earlier on Massachusetts Avenue in northwest Washington.

They still have these, you know, unipolar pretensions that date back to the end of the cold war in the early 1990s. Yeah. Now, so back to NATO here real quick. You know, I'm sure you saw this. We probably talked about it at the time. last November, where the New York Times ran this story about how at NATO they did this big study about how after losing the Afghan war, which was, as I quote them in my book, saying this is a team building exercise for NATO. It's one of the main reasons to have an Afghan war. It's something we can do

together. Call it international greatness. But now that that's over, they go, oh no, we need a new sacred mission, right? Joe Biden says, our commitment to NATO is sacred. And at the same time that they say, we don't have a reason to exist. And so they launched a big study group, probably spent millions of American tax dollars studying what should be the new purpose for NATO. Because I guess they can't get the Germans and the French to even pretend to believe that the Russians are coming at all. And so, according to the New York Times, shifting focus, NATO views China as global security challenge for the North Atlantic treaty organization. Well, it's obviously absurd. And the organization is experiencing not only brain death, as Emmanuel Macron has pointed out, it's severely overextended.

And so, you know, one recalls Walter Lipp. Whitman's warning about alliances that, you know, they're like a chain. They're only as strong as their weakest link. Well, if that's true, then it's not much of a security alliance at all if we're dead set on bringing in countries like Montenero into it. So NATO is really, it poses a severe national security threat to the United States because it empowers states to, try to attempt to punch above their weight and it empowers them to act recklessly and provocatively and we've seen that

with states who aren't members but who have even who've been merely you know promised membership uh here I have in mind and that goes for America too right the Americans act as though they have all of Europe with them when they really don't

if it came to real war with Russia they would all sit it out Oh, certainly. You know, maybe in the Baltics where they'd get the worst of it or something, but. Right. So, again,

so the strategy, the NATO strategy has not been working for roughly 30 years. I don't see any reason why we would try to duplicate that strategy in the so-called

Indo-Pacific region, but that's what the Biden administration seems intent on doing. Yeah. Now, So what kind of trouble do you think that they've really caused with the French here? Do you think it'll really help to undermine the alliance?

I'm sort of not that hopeful. So, no, I don't. I think, you know, it's going to, it's obviously caused some friction in the relationship. It could, it might empower. Macron to do so. It might spur him to rethink the wisdom of being part of this outdated, overextended, and rather dangerous enterprise called NATO. You know, will he do it? I don't, I don't know. I know that his principal opponent in the forthcoming election this spring, Marie Lippend is a vocal critic of the alliance as well.

So time will tell. But I didn't, you know, that was sort of the silver lining that kind of struck out at me. Right. When all this was going down last week. Right. Hey, I'll take it. You know, if it leads to any kind of real dissension between the major powers and the NATO alliance, then I'm for it. This thing is, as you just were saying a few minutes ago, 30 years out of date, H.W. Bush should have abolished NATO back then.

Yes. Think how better off the world would be right now if you had. I think how better off our own country would be if they decided to pursue a peace of it in the aftermath of the Cold War, which they didn't do. Thanks in large part to people like Richard Cheney. who went on than to achieve even more horrific things 10 years later. All right, you guys, that's James Cardin. He runs the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord. You should sign up for their email list.

They send out great stuff every single morning here about what's really going on in our relationship with Russia and all the European powers stuck in the middle and all the rest of it. And this piece is called How Akus May Damage NATO. Thanks again for coming on the show. Thanks, as always, for having me. I appreciate it, Scott. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio,

can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.