The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Scott Horton - Ukraine War - Did the United States Provoke it & Want it All Along?

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

In the first of our 2 sessions with Scott, we get into his powerful book "Provoked," and whether or not the United States is the main villain in the Ukraine War. Was the Maidan a coup, an organic movement, or a bit of both? What was the Nuland phone call all about? Where do the Kissingers and the Tucker Carlsons diverge? Part II is here: https://youtu.be/hdeMqJDWOm4 Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine Available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/hFaTYPm

Dr. Hep was good. Okay. Hit it, Perrielle. Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast for the world-famous comedy seller. And we have a very special guest today, Scott Horton. Scott Horton is the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Anti-War Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM, KPFK in Los Angeles, and podcasts, The Scott Horton Show from scotthorton.org. Additionally, he is the author of the 2021 book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and Fool's Errand, Time to end the war in afghanistan and the editor of the 2019 book the great ron paul scott horton shows interviews 2004 to 2019 and the 2022 book hotter than the sun

time to abolish nuclear weapons did you mention his new book provoked about ukraine no i didn't scott has a new book out called provoked all about Ukraine. Now we were going to have, um, I thought we were going to have him here in a few weeks or, or, uh, next month, but I guess our schedule changed at the last minute. So I've just spent the whole day, uh, you know, downloading into my brain, uh, Scott Horton stuff. Um, kind of like, uh, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. So I'm ready. What fun that must have been, huh? Thank you both for having me.

Happy to be here with you. It's a pleasure to have you here. Now, I had the book, I bought the book a couple weeks ago, and I was already reading it a little bit. And although you and I are going to agree on some stuff, not everything, I really am quite impressed with the detail of your citations and footnotes, because that is a pet peeve of mine with so many other people's books on both sides of every issue. You want to retrace the steps of somebody who wrote something, a paragraph,

and they don't give you anything to go on. Right. And so you really are very thorough. Every every reference that I checked on with you checked out. Great. I'm happy to hear that. You know, I I recognize that the burden of proof is on me. Right. The book is essentially saying that everyone is wrong about everything except me and they all admit it. And here they are admitting it. So I have to demonstrate I have to show my work. I wasn't there. And I'm not talking about my experience in any given war or anything like that. I'm essentially trying to synthesize for you from a wide variety of sources, a very broad take. My previous book on the terror war is the same thing. I start with Jimmy Carter and I go all the

way through Donald Trump. And I try to show as one timeline so that you can understand why the aftermath of Iraq War One was so important to the lead up to the rest of the terror war and the rest of that so that it all fits together. Because if I told you, for example, Ronald Reagan backed Saddam Hussein against Iran, you're going to go, well, yeah, I knew that. Oh, I knew that. No, you're going to say, no, I knew that. But then what does that have to do with anything else, though? And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to plug it all in to one timeline, one story, whether you like it or not. That's essentially my comparative advantage here from covering all these wars over such a long period of time areas I know I disagree with you on is that I think timelines and the notion that you can look backwards and by listing events that occurred decide that that was causation is something I I wouldn't say I never agree with Ukraine. So NATO expansion is something that many of our foreign policy godfathers warned us against, right? Kissinger warned against expanding to Ukraine. Add to that George Kennan, who was the father of the containment doctrine. These are like gold standard people. These are not considered flaky people in American history, right? But they don't,

but Kenan and Kissinger didn't have exactly the same view of NATO expansion. So can you contrast those a little bit? Because I think it's important to tell us which way you come down. Yeah, that's a good place to start. So yeah, now Kenan is famously the inaugurator of the containment policy. He wrote the so-called long telegram anonymously for the State Department, and then, or I guess under his name, but secretly for the State Department. It was later declassified. And then the official version was

published anonymously in Foreign Affairs magazine, the Council on Foreign Relations journal, and it's called On the Sources of Soviet Conduct. And this was essentially inaugurated the containment policy, I guess coined the phrase and inaugurated the containment policy. And yes, he was considered the wisest of all the gray bears, etc.

Now, he and many others in the 1990s, and you might be surprised, people like Robert McNamara, Brent Scowcroft, who was George Bush Sr.'s right-hand man. McNamara, of course, ran the Vietnam War for Kennedy and LBJ. Paul Nitze, who was to the right of Kennan and was known as his rival, his former protege and later his rival, who wanted Soviet rollback, not just containment. He was the famous author of NSC 68, which said America must maintain a world empire or else we'll lose everything, which is crazy if you read his nonsense. But anyway, these guys said, well, now that the commies are gone, we need to be cool.

We need to be a good sport to our defeated Russian rivals. These, as Kennan said, these are the men who overthrew the communists for us. And so don't just say, oh, Russians, we need to handle this very carefully. And all through the 1990s, the consensus was not to do this. Madeleine Albright wrote in her memoir that actually two thirds of the Council on Foreign Relations did not want to expand NATO at all. They agreed with Kennan not to do it. Go ahead. But Kissinger was for expanding NATO.

But Kissinger was. And Brzezinski, too. His Democratic Party counterpart, Zbigniew Brzezinski, both of them Rockefeller guys. And, you know, Nixon and then Jimmy Carter was Brzezinski's president. And there are two and three PO,

basically, these two. And yes, they were both NATO expanders in the 90s and through the 2000s, and they both wrote about it constantly. And it's a real education to see what they said. And numerous times, as you alluded to, they both said, well, you know, we're obviously going to have to make a special case for Ukraine no matter what. So forget any broken promises about NATO expansion and forget even bringing the Baltic states right on Russia's border into NATO.

No argument there from these guys. But when it comes to Ukraine, boy, this is a touchy issue. And you know what we should use as the model is Austria during the last Cold War, where they kept troops out and they kept out of both blocks and nobody killed them. And they got away with neutrality through the whole Cold War. Troops out and they kept out of both blocks and nobody killed them. And they got away with neutrality through the whole Cold War. That's what we should do to Ukraine because it's such a crucial country. Both sides want to dominate it. So we should instead just let them have real neutrality so that it's not a contest over who controls the thing. And then what happened?

Everybody ignored their best advice and they went ahead headlong anyway into disaster. And that's really the thing about the book is and the story in general and far from the first who told it is that this whole thing is a slow motion train wreck. And as I say, it ain't just Ken. It's all the way through from from H.W. through Clinton and W. Bush and Obama. The wise men are saying we ought to be real careful. And then they're not real careful. But let me ask to that point. So up to the point where we had Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, I can't I can't even keep track of all the countries. You could probably rattle them off. Kissinger seemed to be OK up until that did work out. Or are you if you could go back in time, would you

not have expanded to Poland and Hungary and all these countries? No, I wouldn't have at all. Why? There are different levels of argument here. My personal preference, I'm a Ron Paul guy. I want an absolute abandonment of the American world empire

and a return to strict construction constitutional republicanism here in the United States of America. As a practical matter, how did it not work out well? How did it work out badly? Yeah. So, but right. So all other things being equal, the question here isn't really about what Ron Paul might've done. The question is about like between different factions in the state department or between different factions at the Council on Foreign Relations or between the Bush government and the Clinton government and the next Bush government. What were the differences of opinion

there? The difference is between Kissinger Brzezinski. That's what we're talking about, right? It's not my perfect world, but what were the options that they could have done? As I said, the Austria example was one. But to go back a little bit further, Noam, pardon me, Noam, is they had these alternatives that they had proposed from the beginning. And honestly, it was a disingenuous thing. They were essentially shining the Russians on. But you can see the alternative and why it appealed to the Russians, why the lie appealed to them. They said, listen, what we're going to do is we're going to make NATO a political organization. It's not even

going to be a military alliance anymore. It's going to be like the EU plus America. And we're going to replace it because there's no enemy. So we don't need an alliance anymore. We're going to replace it with a security partnership. And you, the Russians and the Ukrainians and

all of the middle countries between Germany and Russia, all of y'all will be members of it all at once together. And then that way, Ukraine's neutrality is de facto guaranteed right there. There's nothing to fight about. There's not a contest over Ukraine, over Belarus, over the Baltics, over anywhere, because essentially, we're all in this big partnership working together. And now, again, not an alliance, not truly bringing Russia into NATO, but making NATO irrelevant and replacing it with this security partnership. That was what Bush Sr. promised Gorbachev, and that was what Bill Clinton promised Yeltsin, but they were lying.

That was not what they were trying to do. They were just trying to get the Russians to believe that so that they would acquiesce while all along they were planning to expand the NATO alliance. And I should stipulate, because I'm sure you would point out, and I think you did kind of allude to this, these European states, these Eastern European states, they want to be part of the alliance.

It's not like we're the Soviets colonizing them and forcing them at gunpoint to join. They're trying to hide behind America's skirt because they're afraid of the Russians. They have reason to be afraid of the Russians. Well, their countries are stuck nextpoint to join. They're trying to hide behind America's skirt because they're afraid of the Russians. They have reason to be. They have reason to be afraid of Russia. Well, their countries are stuck next door to them. They just were liberated after 50 years of Soviet communism being completely enslaved under, you know, Moscow's regime. And many of them had been imperial possessions under Russia going back and fighting. I mean, if you look at a liquid map of those borders over the centuries of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire and all these different powers fighting over that land,

it's a constantly fluid, changing set of lines on the maps, all of them drawn in blood at different times, you know? So your worldview, as I understand, you want to finish your sentence? Go ahead. Yeah, sure. But the question was, and even Bill Clinton himself said this, that like, well, look, Poland might want one thing. What matters is what's good for the United States of America.

And and as as his secretary of defense said, William Perry, you know, we talk about Kennan, his sitting secretary of defense said, oh, man, you know what? I'm sorry, but Prague and Warsaw are just not as important as Moscow. Buchanan said the same thing. Buchanan, as everyone knows, is a super patriot. Nixon and Reagan's speechwriter, hardcore anti-communist, would never take guff from a commie for a moment. But he says, well, geez, why are we picking a fight with these guys?

We shouldn't be handling it this way. And in fact, he pointed out, Buchanan pointed out in 99, that look what happens as it was just a proposal at the time. It came true under W. Bush. Russian naval base between Lithuania and Poland on the Baltic Sea, we leave it behind NATO lines from Moscow's point of view looking west. They have this important military base, but it's behind a NATO country, Lithuania. And you might remember at the beginning of the war, there's an easement, basically. It's called the Sulwaki Corridor across Lithuania that they take a railroad from Belarus to get to Kaliningrad. And the Lithuanians cut it off.

And they said, we would never be so bold to do that, except we're members of NATO and America has our back so we can stick it to the Russians and shut off their access to their port. Scott, so I want to I want to zoom out a little bit because it's your worldview. By the way, you're very, very good in the book with keeping a chock full of these details, but in a narrative that is engaging. I've read some books, history books, my eyes just water. But actually, your story, you're a gifted writer and the story dances around. But for the purposes of this podcast, because we have a limited amount of time.

Sure. Because I find your worldview so fascinating. You alluded to it a second ago. I want to try to keep a little bit zoomed out. So for instance, you, I think I have you right. You would,

you would concede that NATO membership in all these other States. And I would have like 15 countries or something that we, I'm not sure, but yeah, something like that. Yeah. And that actually did work to keep the world stable. And it didn't blow up in our face as George Kenan, well, his worst case, but maybe it did a little bit because we have a cold

relationship with Russia. But you actually don't care about that so much. You feel that regardless of the outcome, you just feel America shouldn't be involved in this anyway, even if even if Russia does go back into all these countries and Russia does reinstate, you know, the bear does rise again, as they were as they would talk about, because it has so many times in the past. You still think that's their problem. We stay home here in America, correct? Yes. And however, and I think, as you would know in the book, that I don't argue from that point of view, right? I cite my great hero, Ron Paul, and I say, you know, this is the North Star of what I think is best for America. And I cite, you know, even

Reaganite type Republicans agreeing that they think that that would be the best world. Even Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who is very close to the neoconservatives, said, well, now that the commies are gone, we should abolish the CIA. We should be a republic, not an empire. We don't have to do this anymore. So I read a republic, not an empire, whatever. Yeah, that's Pat. Yeah. But so like even Moynihan agreed with Pat. Right. So in other words, I am not shy at all about my very plumb line, anti-government libertarianism and non-interventionism. But I argue from all other things being equal. I argue from what were the options available at the time that all the serious credentialed people with the decision making power, what were they entertaining? What did they think? What were their arguments? What were they doing? And so in that sense, I think I truly demonstrate that it did not have to be this way. And not just if only they had listened to the

great Ron Paul, but even if they had listened to their own selves on their best days, they wouldn't have made the mistakes they had made. Except that you do, in my opinion, with all due respect, as they say, I feel you do work backwards because I heard you just on the car on the way over in an interview that you did like maybe two years ago, 18 months ago. You think we were wrong in World War I. You think we were wrong in World War II. You think we were wrong in Korea. You think we were wrong to fight, to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. You think we were wrong in Korea. You would think we were wrong to fight, to oust Saddam

Hussein from Kuwait. You think we were wrong to fight Al-Qaeda. And you have a factual basis for every single one of those, a timeline, which you think bears you out. But I would say in some way, I mean, it could just be a coincidence that, you know, that you see this, but some of those, for instance, where are you on Daryl Cooper's notion and that Churchill was installed by the Zionists in order to get England into the war? Do you believe that part of it? You know, I would have to defer to other expertise on how Churchill came to power exactly and that kind of thing.

I don't know enough about that particular – Or the David Irving theory. Well, I could tell you this. I think it's beyond any argument that World War II is Woodrow Wilson's fault and that because – and maybe people don't – you know, everybody kind of knows a little of this. Like there's enough touchstones here. Everyone should know enough to agree with this, but you just probably never heard it, you know, bore all the way out. But essentially, the story is that World War I had ended as a stalemate.

Wait, wait. I don't want to get sucked into all World War II. Wait, wait, but I do, because I can say it quick here, okay? I can say it quick here, so people understand the narrative. Pick up the story where Churchill takes over, right? Okay, well, like I say, I got gotta beg off Churchill taking over for a moment. Cause I just am not expert enough on that, but I can say that I can say this, the war remember Wilson's slogan was we want peace without victory, right? In other words, we don't want to conquer Europe and take it over. We just

want to make sure the good guys win or whatever. But that was what they had already, was peace without victory. Nobody won. It was a stalemate. Everybody was barefoot and frozen and out of ammo and wanted to go home. Everybody. It was done. The Russians, I mean, pardon me, the Germans were on French soil, but just barely. And everyone was ready to quit. And then stupid brings the Americans to come and help the British and the French completely, first of all, bribe Kerensky to stay in the war long enough for the commies to take over the Soviet Union, which would have never happened. It was Woodrow Wilson that gave him a bunch of trucks and guns and tanks and rubber tires and money to stay in the war. And that's what allowed the communists to seize power in Russia and create the USSR.

And then secondly, he allowed the British and the French to completely destroy Germany, strip them of all their territories, enforce this horrific blockade and all the economic reparations, and the rest of that, that led to the rise that everyone agrees, as John Maynard Keynes predicted, that everyone agrees helped lead to the rise of the Nazi Party. Now you have oil and water with communism and fascism right next door. And World War Two is written. Right. But of course, but I mean, right from your point of view, but I'm just trying to I'm trying to pin you down on something. Not aggressively, actually, because I'm really curious about it, which is that.

You make the argument that actually, if we had if Churchill hadn't done XYZ, the war might have gone differently. Give Germany a corridor to Danzig, appease him one last time, and maybe it will all work out. But my question is this. Do you come to this position because you say, well, actually this would be better, this would have had a better outcome? Or are you saying, I think that would have a better outcome, but even if it wouldn't have a better outcome, either way, I don't want to be in that war. You understand my distinction? Even if the World War II would have turned out worse without America there, more people died, all the Jews, not just 6 million.

That's not our problem. Is that your worldview? Well, look, okay, so I swear to God I'm going to switch right back to what you're saying. not just six million. That's not our problem. Is that is that your worldview? Well, look, OK, so I swear to God, I'm going to switch right back to what you're saying. But it's sort of like with Iraq or two. I have to argue that even if he's got all the weapons, we don't have to do this. We should not do this. He's not really friends with Osama bin Laden, et cetera. Now I have to also stop and explain to you he doesn't have the weapons. This is all a bunch of crap. But it's two separate arguments either way, but I have to win at both of them.

And the same kind of thing, right? So in this sense, you know, the question, it depends where you start the question, right? At what point was Chamberlain or Churchill right to do this or that? And I am not anything like a scholar of World War II. I've read a few books about it and really by critics mostly in my adulthood. So Pat Buchanan's book, Churchill, and I believe that Nicholson Baker's book, Human Smoke, both is, although his is not exactly narrative driven, he just shows, if you've ever read that book, it's just news story after news story after news story, kind of illustrating right up to the point of American intervention in World War II

is basically what human smoke is. And Buchanan makes the argument essentially that it was Neville Chamberlain's blunder to give the war guarantee to Poland because, and I'm not saying a hundred percent, this is my entire opinion and I am a mirror reflection of Pat Buchanan. But this is my explanation of Pat's argument in his book, Churchill. The title actually comes from a quote from Churchill from a letter that he wrote to FDR. It's unbelievable. It's Churchill who said, I guess that was an unnecessary war and we shouldn't have done that. He wrote that in a letter to Churchill. That's why that's the title of the book. No, no, that's not right. I've just read that recently. When he uses the phrase unnecessary war, Churchill meant we could have avoided the war. It was unnecessary because if we had done what we should have done, meaning that if we had stood up to Germany earlier, this could have all been avoided. That's why he meant it was unnecessary. I can't. I'd have to recheck that citation. I can prove that to you, but go ahead. Okay. Well, he also has a quote from Churchill saying, it looks like we stuck the wrong pig because now Stalin has occupied all of Eastern Europe. And he's saying, oops,

we screwed that up is what is the quote from Churchill there. So now and of course, and I interviewed Pat about this and I asked him, you know, obviously a huge part of the narrative of World War Two is America went to save the Jews from the Holocaust, which is, of course, obviously not the motive of FDR to intervene in the war. But is, of course, known as a happy side effect of the war, was that America helped put an end to the Holocaust. And I put that to Buchanan. And Buchanan says, listen, Scott, what I'm saying is no war, no Holocaust. And that it was Britain who really made it into the war that it became. That Germany, you know, obviously, yes, they were stealing Danzig, but there's no real reason from that point of view. Again, I'm not the scholar on this war, but from that point of view's argument, there's

no real reason to think that he was going to go on to conquer the rest of Europe in that case. And then the way that Pat says it is this, that by getting the war guarantee to Poland that he was unable to enforce. Oh, by the way, he says that Lord Gray, the foreign secretary, when Neville Chamberlain gave the war guarantee, Lord Gray said he should be locked in an insane asylum. Because now we're giving a bunch of fascist colonels, also a bunch of Jew-hating freaks who ruled Poland at that time. We're now giving them the power to declare war for the British Empire and take over our interests for us. And then I swear I'll finish in just one more sentence here.

And so that, again, Pat Buchanan's argument is that by constructing the situation the way that the British did, they essentially, quote-unquote, forced, you understand the context, they forced Germany to attack and destroy all the western democracies first when they were already headed east where they were going to fight against

the communists and if they hadn't done that then even if the war had broken off and say the soviets and the and the um nazis ended up fighting over poland and eastern europe then at least the jews and other civilians would have had somewhere to flee to. But now the Nazis end up conquering the entire West first before they turned East and Hitler, because of the war guarantee, then made the Ribbentrop Pact, the Stalin Hitler Pact to put off the war in the East for two years while he kills all the good guys first. Does that make sense at least to you, what I'm saying? I'm familiar with the argument and it makes some sense, although I don't buy it.

But I understand that it follows in a time. I'm going to get to that. So I looked it up while you were talking. This is from The Gathering Storm. Now, The Gathering Storm was Churchill's book about the gathering storm, meaning what was going on starting in Germany post-World War I, how they were building up, how nobody was standing up to them. Churchill was giving speeches saying we've got to put a stop to Germany, especially the rearmament. And the famous paragraph is, one day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said it once, the unnecessary war. There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.

The human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and the victories of the righteous cause, we have still not found peace or security and that we lie in the grip of an even worse peril than those we have surmounted so i think that might be a different quote than the one that i was looking at but that's what i was looking at was more like an oops we don't need to do that maybe but that's the intro to the book which is the famous unnecessary war the the the gathering storm is uh about the unnecessarily the classic i do have pat's book but i wouldn't know where to look in it to find the quote because i read it online recently so i wouldn't want to this art is important because kissinger although he was uh warning not to make a mistake essentially and push russia too far by nosing around in ukraine ukraine towards the end of his life after it

already happened and i'm going to play the video for you now. He said, well, and this is very interesting, and this is where the schools of thought really diverge. He says, well, now that it's happened, I believe that Ukraine should join NATO. Yeah, of course. He's a government employee. Now that we caused a crisis, we need more power and money to solve it.

Yeah, no doubt. I'm going to play the video. Now it's safe. I warn you, I'm pulling up my Kenan quote. I like his framed picture of the big mind in there. I express my admiration for the president of Ukraine and for the heroic conduct of the Ukrainian people when I asked them to participate in an effort which should be made by Europe and Ukraine together. Before this war, I was opposed to membership of Ukraine in NATO because I feared that it would start exactly the process that we are seeing now, now that this process has reached this level. The idea of a neutral Ukraine under these conditions is no longer meaningful.

And at the end of the process that I described, it ought to be guaranteed by NATO in whatever forms NATO can develop. But I believe Ukrainian membership in NATO would be an appropriate outcome. And he goes on to say, and be good for the world, good for freedom. a strengthening of Europe, an opening to Russia, if it meets the required conditions to participate as a member in these European processes and as a fulfillment of the hopes which have characterized the evolution of Europe since the end of the war and fulfill the principles of America in bringing about a more peaceful world order.

Look, I think you already know. If America says that we're giving NATO membership to Ukraine, then the Russians aren't going to stop until they get to Poland. If we're going to give NATO membership to any part of what's left of Ukraine, the war is going to continue until that is rendered impossible more again still. All the hawks say this about the war guarantee in the first place. If only George W. Bush had completely disregarded every single person around him who knew better and had just outright given them an Article five membership full membership war guarantee in 2008 then this never would have

happened but that's nonsense if bush had announced that putin would have rolled in the tanks the next day and before anyone could sign the treaty and anybody's a damn fool to think otherwise of course that's exactly what he would have done and that's what he would do right now if we right now he's a damn fool to think otherwise. Of course, that's exactly what he would have done. And that's what he would do right now. If we right now, he's got four provinces. If we say we're bringing Kiev into NATO, he's going to keep going until he takes Kiev. If we say, well, now we're bringing Lviv into NATO, he's going to keep rolling until he hits Lviv, man. You think he can do that? You think he has the he can barely keep the provinces that he's got and he's got the Russian speaking people?

Does he does Putin really want to take over Kiev? I don't think he wants to, but I'm saying to keep him out of NATO, I think he would have to continue the war. Because Kissinger thinks, now Kissinger is not a dope. And he's certainly as savvy about that psychology that you're describing as you are, right? As I am, that's for sure. He thinks it's feasible that if you give the Russians, all the Russian-speaking people, basically, and the warm water port, that goes 75% of the way to satisfying their fundamental strategic interest.

I agree with that. And then you might have no choice but to just to take it on the chin for the rest. I mean, maybe he's better off not having these Ukrainians. I mean, we're going to get into the Maidan coup, as you put it. But however you want to analyze that coup, a million people showed up in the square to protest that last minute turn towards Russia. That's something for Putin to worry about. Yeah. Look, I have a section in the book called Russians Pyrrhic Victory, which is about how,

look, you know, by any Russian standard, this guy completely blew it right. By essentially removing the Russian population out of Ukraine, he's left a rump Ukraine with no Russians in it or no pro Russians in it. They used to win elections. That's why George W. Bush and Barack Obama had to overthrow the government twice in 10 years over there. Now they're never going to win an election again. Now they're all Russians and what's left of Ukraine is going to be dominated by anti-Russian hawks from the West from now on. Now, look, NATO membership, I forbid it. I'm sorry. No, America cannot give a NATO war guarantee to Ukraine because that means we will end up having a nuclear war with the Russian Federation.

Don't you believe in mutual assault destruction work? Don't you believe it works? this whole war is this is what Putin has said for now, 18 years in a row. Your missile defense plans make me think you're trying to achieve a first strike against capability against me. And I'm now making more offensive missiles and I'm now rolling my tanks into Ukraine because I'm not going to let you put these missile launchers in Kharkiv. Scott, nobody has first strike. Everybody has nuclear subs out in the ocean. There's no such thing as a first strike, meaning that we sort of. But here's the thing about that. OK, there's a very important article that ran in Foreign Affairs in 2006 that said, yeah, we got them overmatched.

Now we can do it. We can achieve first strike capability. And this caused a huge controversy in American arms control circles and in Russia when they announced that. This was after Bush had already torn up the anti-ballistic missile treaty and in effect had torn up START II, which would have banned all multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles. It's the greatest treason that W. Bush ever committed against mankind in a giant pile of them. And so then he announced, this is really important for you and your listeners to understand, when he announced that he's putting these anti-ballistic missile systems

in Romania and Poland, those are dual-use launchers. The Mark 41 missile launcher made by Lockheed Martin Marietta. You can shoot a Tomahawk cruise missile tipped with an H-bomb out of those same missile tubes. And as soon as they announced they intended to do this, Colonel McGregor, who was still then in the U.S. Army, in European command, said, we have to set up an inspection regime where some Russian low-down level officer can sit there on a barstool and make sure that nobody is putting offensive missiles in these missile launchers. And they refused to do that. And as Putin said repeatedly, if you thinks that the involvement in NATO should have parameters

would not allow us to put offensive weapons on Russia's border. I think there's some other NATO, modified NATO. I think there are some other rules for other NATO countries. Okay, but no, check it out. Wait, wait. I want to say, let me just have the ball for a minute. So first of all, I just think it's absurd to think that America is contemplating wanting to vaporize Russia with nuclear weapons.

There's zero upside to it. And obviously just the fallout traveling around planet Earth is enough. I don't believe Putin thinks that way. I think Putin, as I understand it, feels that there's a lot of ethnic Russians in Ukraine and these are Siamese twin nations. And this is a great humiliation. And yeah, and these aren't exclusive concepts. Look, the nuclear threat is there. No, he said he said for years and and and even the flight time is legitimate in some way because it gives you very little time to react to a mistake, as we know there have been mistakes.

That's right. But I doubt that he actually thinks that some American president, let me vaporize. It's madness if he thinks that. Okay, but I want to move on to the next thing. I want to move on to the next thing. We're already 30, almost 40 minutes. We're almost, we're running out of time. So that's the Kissinger wing of the thing.

And I find that at certain times persuasive and look, the results speak for themselves. The fact is this kind of did blow up in our face. So it's very, uh, it's very bad form to go back and say, no, you guys were predicting it. We're all wrong. And even though it happened, I still say you're wrong. Like they, you know, they never look, this is, this is huge. They never say they're wrong. They never admit never admit their role i know but let me get but there's another wing of this there's another wing of this that concerns me very very much and that is the wing that um it's more it's more associated in my mind anyway with the libertarian thing and that is a kind of not it's an it's an antagonism towards Ukraine and antagonism towards Zelensky, even though that's not right.

Well, I don't buy into that stuff. Hold on. And I'm going to play the video. And then and also it's laced with kind of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish themes. I'm going to play a video now. It's a Tucker Carlson. Those are totally separate issues, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish themes. I'm going to play you a video now. It's a Tucker Carlson. Those are totally separate issues, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, as you well know. Yes, I said both.

But you listen to this. You sort of made it like a slash or a hyphen there. Those are different things. They can be different or they can be related. And you have to decide in each individual case what's going on. Obviously, if you hate Jews, then you will also hate Israel.

No, you can. each individual case what's going on obviously if you hate jews then you will also hate israel there are plenty of other people who demonize zelensky and maybe demonize ukraine where i don't do any of that i i think he's actually like uh he's probably doing his best in a very difficult position it's just he's not my shoes. Good. Put it on, Mike. Ukraine, as you may have heard, is led by a man called Zelensky, sweaty and rat like a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock. So the question is, what is actually going on in Ukraine? Because based on everything that I am seeing, this is following almost precisely what the Bolsheviks did. It almost looks like to me like we are being fooled and that Zelensky is fooling the public

into believing that this is some sort of battle that they're having with Russia. When in fact, what's really happening seems to be some sort of an ethnic cleansing. And when we critiqued him and we talked about how he was in bed with the oligarchs, when we critiqued him and we started asking questions, the media rushed and they tried to use anti-Semitism as a screen. They said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you cannot talk anything about Zelensky that makes you an anti-Semite. It's crazy, very bizarre. And I think that now people are starting to notice that what's happening in Ukraine actually appears to be an act of evil. Where did the idea of a concentration camp come from? The reason why we're not allowed to learn about these people, we don't talk about Henry Podota, is because he's a Jew.

I mean, you read Alexander Solzhenitsyn talking about the gulags and who built those gulag systems. Almost finished. Don't stop. Those gulag systems. The majority of them, he eventually wrote a book. Even before Russiagate in 2016, they had no connection with Russia. This is bullshit. I'm not doing this.

I do think that Russia is disliked by a lot of people in Washington because of the perception that they are detrimental to our interests in the Middle East. Are you serious right now? Do you think that's the prime move over here? Yeah, the Russians operate in Syria. And as a result, they end up being antagonistic to Israel, which ends up being defined as U.S. interests as well. But strictly speaking, this has kind of nothing to do with us whatsoever.

I mean, I honestly, for the past— Unless you see Israel as a part of the United States. Okay, that's enough. So that's it. I didn't mean to— This is such bullshit. You're going to sit here and play two and a half minutes of other people talking and make me answer for other people?

I can sit here and play clips of Robert Kagan for you and make you answer for them. Get the fuck out of here. Hold on. Hold on. I'm telling you, I Get the fuck out of here. Hold on. Hold on. I'm telling you, I'm being in good faith here. This is a, this is a, another two minutes on it. Still, you're going to sit here and make me answer for all of that. It was all black.

That was the last thing on the, on the video was there. I put the out point on the video. I forgot to reset the output. That was the end of it. I can show you if you want. Um, the point is this, these are the prominent anti-Ukraine voices out there now. Now, my first question is, am I wrong that every one of those has a kind of point of view about? I mean, Greenwald says we're actually there because of Israel.

I didn't even hear the Greenwald statement. I was too busy objecting that this is bullshit that you're gonna sit here and make me answer what all these other people are saying. He said- He says- I'll tell you this, I agree with Candace Owens completely that people are hiding behind the Jewish identity of the president in order to say that you're not allowed to say bad things about him. I think that's a bunch of crap.

And quite honestly, as I already said, I don't pick on Zelensky personally, not too much in my book. I don't call him rat like this or that. He is corrupt. In fact, as I'm sure you noted last week, it was revealed that it was the U.S. State Department that was behind revealing the Panama Papers, which showed that he's a corrupt billionaire who got a bunch or at least multimillionaire who got his money from the most corrupt man in Ukraine, Kolomoisky, and who had a bunch of robbing. I don't doubt any leader is corrupt, but I'm asking you what I hear. Sweaty rat like friend of Black Rock. It's true of Christians.

Is that a Jewish illusion or not? No, I don't think it is, dude. And honestly, you sound like a college kid whining about racism and this and that. If, you know, anti-Semitism is when somebody does something to somebody, not they hurt your little feelings, come on, man, grow up. You know, Tucker Carlson can't hurt you. I didn't say that. He said something that like, you don't like the way it sounded or the implication. So what? Let's talk about like who's actually killing people and what's happening here. This is silly.

Well, it's not silly because if that's his if his motivation against this war is what appeared. Well, Greenwald says he's being fought for Israel, and Candace Owens says it's Bolsheviks, which she's defined as Jews, and Tucker Carlson is – there's something – then we're very far from the Kissinger kind of what's in America's best interest point. But why are they so hateful of Zelensky? And is there a rational argument in their behalf? They're not making you're making arguments. They're not making arguments, right?

Look, I don't think Tucker, I think Greenwald has begun. I don't think he's had a chance to finish the book. I know that Candace Owens just got her hands on it the other day and has not had a chance to read the book yet. I hope very much that Tucker Carlson will read the book and understand the best context as I could put it across. I want everyone to read it and understand the thing. But regardless of whether Zelensky looks like a rat or what, the real point is that this is not truly any kind of Western democracy that we could incorporate into our system.

I debated Wesley Clark, and he says, listen, we couldn't bring Russia into any kind of partnership for peace because ultimately they're too corrupt. Their democracy and their economic system is too corrupt to be part of our system. Well, the same thing goes for Ukraine in spades. It's as corrupt as, you know, Kabul or Baghdad under American occupation. It's one of the most corrupt governments in the entire world. And Joe Biden himself has said, come on, we can't bring them into NATO. You know, did you see his Time magazine interview from June or July? Where he goes, I'm the guy who said we'll never bring them into NATO, which that's not true. He said that half the time.

And he said, we sure will one day, the other half of the time. But Biden knows that we can't bring Ukraine into NATO because they're nothing but a security risk. We can't let a country that's run by criminals make foreign policy decisions that could drag us into a war. And this goes back again to what Putin said on the eve of war, was he said, listen, Ukraine and the West vow that Crimea truly belongs to Ukraine still and is occupied territory. Whereas I say it's Russian again. Now, if you bring Ukraine into NATO and Ukraine attacks Crimea and I defend Crimea, you're going to say that I'm the one attacking and invoke Article 5, and that could lead to a war between NATO and the Russian Federation. And you don't want that, do you?

And that is rational. I'm not saying it's an excuse for a war, but that's not he's all tied up in his romantic notions about recreating Peter the Great's empire or Stalin's empire. These are security risks. And previously on the missile defense point, Putin himself said your almost exact words. He said, Bush, I like you and I trust you. And I don't think you're trying to achieve a first strike capability against me. But look at the position I'm in. I'm the president here. I can't make my foreign policy based on assurances. I have to make my foreign policy based on the capability that you are building around my country. And you are literally surrounding me with dual use missile launchers. And so I have to respond to that by

building more and more heavy missiles with more and more multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles on them so that it can overwhelm your defenses and your new offenses. And so Bush, what he did was he kicked off a new nuclear arms race completely idiotically. He had no good reason to do it. Let me tell you why I have a problem. I have a few more questions I want to ask you. I hope we don't run out of time.

Why I have my skepticism sometimes of timelines. I have a kind of thing which I kind of call the difficult child theory of history. It's that you can, like if you have a difficult child, a kid is always in trouble, always misbehaving. If his parents are very lenient, we all say, well, look at those parents. They're so lenient. They should have set limits. They should have been tougher with him. You know, they let him get away with murder and look at him he's

he's a of course he's a difficult child look how he misbehaves or if the parents are very very strict we all find ourselves saying oh they were riding him too hard i mean they wouldn't let this kid have a break everything he did they were criticizing him of course of course they turned him into that that ornery horribly behaved child. Both are plausible. And probably the real reason is the kid was just a difficult child in any timeline. And I thought about this. I don't want to get sucked into Gaza, but I think, well, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. He allowed them to get money.

But that's caused October 7th. But I could just imagine if Netanyahu had tried to immiserate Hamas and not let them have a dime and kept them poorer than ever. People would say, he kept them so poor. Of course, what do you expect? This caused October 7th. So although I understand at certain times blunders do have terrible consequences, you kind of have to zoom out and try to figure out which is which. So if you have a guy who's had multiple relationships

and never once cheated on a woman, and one time he says, you know, you got me so upset I cheated. You say, oh, well, he's never done it before. But you have another guy who's cheated on every relationship he ever had, and he tells you this is the reason I cheated. It could be the same reason. You say, oh, come on, you're a cheater.

And Russia is this recurring bear, which is why, as you already alluded to, all these countries were so desperate to get into NATO. therapy and America was the world empire, the single number one global superpower. And they weren't nothing no more. And they were desperate to suck up to the United States. And Putin, the evil bear, had his highest priority was trying to be the best friend of W. Bush and get along with the United States. Again, not out of any romantic sense, but because that's what was smart for Russia to get along. Why now did Finland and Sweden immediately want to join NATO? Because there's we're in the middle of a war. But are they reason they're worried that it'll get worse? They want to hide behind America's skirt before they won't be able to anymore. Before they thought it was wiser to stay out of the alliance and not pick a fight. And that

worked for finland throughout the entire cold war the soviet union never attacked him the whole time and by the way when finland did join uh nato it was actually kind of funny if you go back and look at this i swear putin must have taken some muscle relaxers that day or something he had to have been high because it was just the way that he said it he was like like, hey, man, it's cool if Finland joins NATO because like after all, we don't have a border dispute with them. We don't have like ongoing problems with Finland. So like, yeah, you know, we're going to have to move our military forces up there. We're going to have to take this into account.

But it's not the same thing as the fight over the Donbass. It's like, what can you say, man? He's trying to be, he's, look, it's sort of like if you were the Ayatollah Khomeini for a moment. What are you going to do, or Khomeini, sorry. What are you going to do with a problem like the USA, right? Like maybe you hate the great Satan, but you still got to deal with the world empire. You don't have a whole lot of options for sticking your thumb in our eye. Let me, let me bond with you for one second.

And then we'll get back to fighting. You know, one of the things that I know gets your goat is all the false stories that come out that Putin's Putin's on the has pancreatic cancer. He's about to die. He's, you know, while this was going on, these stories are coming out. I have a friend who's connected in Russia. And he was telling me that his close friend, who I also know, just texted him that morning that he had been playing ice hockey with Putin. It's not exactly under the radar. Playing ice hockey with Putin and the American press was reporting that Putin was on his deathbed. So I totally get you.

But anyway, you write in the book. But imagine if the shoe was on the other foot and say Canada. What if the Russians, after having won the Cold War, had begun incorporating all of Latin America into their Warsaw Pact alliance, used neo-Nazis, and Ottawa proposed kicking the United States out of its naval bases in Alaska, then helped the new regime launch a hot war against people of Vancouver for refusing to recognize the new junta, all while threatening the government in Washington next.

So this is like, what if the shoe were on the other foot? And I, although, what's the word there? It's a facile analogy at first, because it seems one-to-one. I want to answer your analogy with a question. Okay. Why does it seem so outlandish to us that Canada in a million years would feel the need to form an alliance with Russia to protect itself against the United States? Why would Mexico never in a million years think they have to form an alliance, run into Russia's arms

because they're right on the border of America? This is what I look to with Finland and Sweden. There is, there's a fundamental difference. Did you mention the part, did you quote the part where I said they overthrew the government twice in 10 years because the people kept voting wrong? Because in fact, Ukraine didn't feel like joining the West. America overthrew the government there until their sock puppets who said they wanted to join the West were the ones there. It's like saying Hamid Karzai has invited us to stay and continue occupying Afghanistan. It's a joke, man. It's not true. So you can see that there's a difference between America and Russia vis-a-vis our neighbors, that our neighbors don't fear us the way I don't know that that's

true. Are you sure that the Mexicans don't fear us after what all our policies have been? We've invaded Mexico, what, three times? We we we forced W. Bush, forced Vincente Fox to militarize the drug war. They're killing tens of thousands of people, creating the Zetas who are like the ISIS of drug dealers, cutting people's heads off, absolute monster terrorists as a direct result of American policy there. Everyone knows that.

I think if they feared us, they would be behaving a little bit differently. What if China rigged two elections in a row or obstructed two Mexican elections in a row to make sure that their favored puppets were in power in Mexico City. And then those favored puppets invited Mexico to build a military base. You wouldn't be all philosophical about why does Mexico feel the need to do this? You would be saying, what's the Pentagon going to do about it? And by the way, I'm glad you brought this up because I was Canada. That's why I used Canadaada canada or mexico it works either way um it there's a guy named christopher lane who um writes for harper's you're gonna give me time

for one more question after this right sure okay good so so lane i don't think i have anyone after you today okay so lane he's he said to the pentagon to different generals at the pentagon i'm not exactly sure what his role was. He was a journalist, but it was some kind of consulting gig or something. He's talking to all of these generals. And he says to them, he says it like a totally straight question. Like he's not setting them up for an analogy.

He just asked them a totally straight forward question. What would we do if the Chinese intervened in politics in Mexico and got a puppet regime in there and started building military bases there and bringing them into an alliance and the generals all say immediately first threats then sanctions and then we roll our tanks in of course we're never gonna put up with that for a moment and then he Lane says to them well geez guys you ever wonder how the Russians feel about us in Ukraine? And he says to a man, they all say to him, huh, I guess we never really thought about it that way before, huh, dude? Because you know what they say, Noam? They say, it's a defensive alliance. It's a defensive

alliance. It's a defensive line. So if I bring my entire gang of Crips and occupy your front yard, I go, no, these are all my defensive gang members. We don't mean you any harm, Noam. They're only here to protect me if you attack me. You're going to see me on your front yard, in your front yard or surrounding your house and say you don't look like a defensive alliance to me. OK, but I get it. I get what you're saying. But at some point, you and I, even if Putin might not see it the way we do, we do have to take a stab at reality.

And you said you understand why Poland and Hungary and these Czechoslovakia, whatever, the Czech Republic, want NATO protection because you acknowledge they have a real fear of Russia harassing them or worse, where Canada doesn't have that fear. So if China came nosing around with the military in Canada, it would be so weird. We might not tolerate it, but it wouldn't be the mirror image because you and me, Olufren, would have to say, well, you know what? What's going on? The reason Poland is going into NATO is not the reason Canada is doing it. So it looks the same, but they're actually not the same at all because you Poland really is scared. And Canada is up to something.

They're two different things. Unless unless you follow the shoe is actually on the other foot. What we're talking about is in this analogy, America lost the Cold War and the Soviet Union won it and the Soviet Union expanded through all of Western Europe, the Caribbean. And so they are the global superpower. And so it only makes sense for Canada or Mexico to want to join their military alliance. But the problem is America won't tolerate it. We'll go to war first. We still don't have any history of harassing. Anyway, so no, actually, we invaded Mexico repeatedly and we James. Well, the last time I think was under Woodrow Wilson.

But again, America intervenes brutally in Mexico constantly. And it I think it's been since James Madison that we launch an aggressive war against Canada. And so they're probably not too worried about that. That's the War of 1812. Yeah, but we don't look, we don't have a raging ethnic conflict between Canada and Mexico. I got a situation. No, wait, wait, wait. If we had a situation where America was now ruled by a black and Hispanic coalition at the expense of the Anglos. Or if Canada better, if Canada was now ruled by the new Muslim majority and now all the Anglos in Canada are being persecuted,

that would become America's business to go in there and protect them. They would do that. OK, I understand. Yeah, I do understand. Of course, I understand. By the way, you got to admit, this is your best interview today. This is a good one. I'm doing all right. It's a good conversation. I want to ask you about the Nuland call now, but I just want to say

a lot of what you said I had thought of and I actually had a hunch and I looked into it and I said, I wonder what Noam Chomsky's view was about the Cuban Missile Crisis, because that's a kind of mirror image thing. It's almost like, I know what Chomsky's view was about the Cuban Missile Crisis, because that's a kind of mirror image thing. It's almost that I know Chomsky view was America was wrong in the Cuban Missile Crisis. We had no right to complain about Cuba having missiles aimed at the United States. No right to complain? Yes.

I'll tell you, there's a there's a much better take on the Cuban Missile Crisis by a libertarian named Ivan Eland, who wrote about how, of course, it was. Oh, and by the way, this is in Daniel Ellsberg's memoirs in his his memoir, The Doomsday Machine. He takes responsibility for the Cuban Missile Crisis because it was Dan Ellsberg's bright idea to have the deputy secretary of defense give a big speech saying, hey, Khrushchev, you punk, we know you only have four missiles and we have a bunch and we can do all this and you're overmatched. And we provoked it. It was our fault. We provoked. So no matter what, this is my point. No matter what the story is, America is always the bad guy. And by the way, you think that we want the war in Ukraine, right? Well, hold on now. America installed medium range nuclear missiles in Turkey and in Italy. And then on top of that, look, this is Ellsberg's own story. He was the guy

who said, this will be a great idea to give this speech humiliating Khrushchev, but it totally backfired. So you can say, oh, you always say it's provoked, but like, come on, it literally was, man. According to the principles involved in it. I couldn't create a timeline of provocations from the other side. Well, I guess so. But I'm just saying, like, have you ever read Dan Ellsberg's book? Because I think you would say that, like, oh, what an anecdote. I don't know.

And there's another asymmetry, which is we have such an open society. Imagine, like, me and Perriell are married for 20 years. And now we're going to divorce court. And I've kept a daily diary of everything I did wrong, everything I thought every time I was feeling angry at her, wanted to call her a cunt, you know, and, and then, and she has nothing. And now we've got to go before the judge and she can pick out this page and that page and that page. And she can create a whole narrative about what a bastard I am. And I got nothing on her because there's, we, they don't, we don't have access to their diaries, to their communiques, to their to their conversation throughout all history.

Then, I mean, no, but I'm saying we have to presume even and we have actual provocations we can point to. But this notion of saying this leader said this in this cabinet meeting, you think there's not that on the other side? You think there's no meaning they didn't discuss first strikes against America? Well, of course. Come on. Anyway, look. There's a great example coming up. OK, so go ahead.

I know what you're about to say about the Mayan. You think we want. But I got to give me two. You think that we wanted the war in Ukraine, correct? We let it happen because we wanted that. I heard you said in an interview. No, no. Actually, I don't think I did. I think you said in an interview that you wanted to do it. that you wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it.

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You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it.

You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. Youians as much help as we can to fight against you but they were not willing well wait you're skipping ahead a step you're skipping ahead a step okay so so plan a i think is this is clear i could be wrong about this but i think this much is clear and this is what everyone reading the new york times would agree plan a was to tell putin you better not if you do this we are was to tell Putin, you better not. If you do this, we are going to help them fight you. We're going to wage a massive economic war against you and we're going to make this hurt

like hell. You should think again. Which is a green light, which is a green light because he didn't care about the economic sanctions. But go ahead. Yeah. Well, yeah, it wasn't it wasn't enough to stop him. A red light, I don't think would have been at that point necessarily either.

What might have worked would be good faith negotiations. And you're supposed to just dismiss that and poo-poo that or whatever. However, not you particularly, but we are all supposed to just say no, of course not, because he's Hitler and whatever. However, at the time this was going on,

a lot, or at least a substantial group of professional, you know, longtime credentialed diplomats said that Putin's treaty proposal was not completely unreasonable. Of course, we would never just sign on the on the dotted line at the bottom, but it was the basis. It could have been the basis for real negotiations with the West. And even Biden administration officials said that to The Post and The Times. I also spoke with Chas Freeman, who was the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia during Iraq War One and went to China with Richard Nixon and all that,

an extremely experienced foreign policy, foreign affairs, foreign service officer. And he told me this is a reasonable treaty to begin to negotiate on. There was one for NATO and one for the U.S. They're basically the same. And this goes back to what you were saying before about, well, Kissinger said we could just promise not to move bases there. Maybe we could bring them into NATO, but we just promised not to move our military forces there.

But that's what Bill Clinton did in 1997. He signed what was called the Founding Act, which was not an official agreement, but it was on paper and signed. And it promised never to move military equipment into the new NATO states. And then what did W. Bush do? He moved military equipment into the new NATO states. I'm asking about the interview I heard just a little while ago where you said you think that we, I guess it's your plan B, we wanted the war with Ukraine to bring Russia into a quagmire because people, you had some theory about it. There's some like a college textbook way you call this, where the people who make decisions profit from it in some way, or I don't know. Oh, no, no, no. I'll talk about money at that part. Surely. No, what it is

is exactly this. And I have source after source. In fact, I feel terrible that I miss this at the time. I was still working on the audio book of my last book about the Middle East. And I was like, you know, not doing diligent enough study during the time that all of this was happening in December and January and February of of 21 and into 22 there. However, when I went back, I found so many sources of official government employees, as well as think tankers and wonks and hawks of all descriptions saying what we want to do here is recreate the 1980s Afghan war, where we supported the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union. So in other words, plan A is tell Putin, you better not. Plan B, and this is David Sanger,

he is one of the absolutely most important, most connected reporters at the New York Times. And David Sanger said, the thinking is to lock Russia in to a long-term battle in Ukraine, to extend the war as long as possible in order to strategically weaken Russia. And it's not just Sanger. It's source after source after source after source after source all around that same time. And they all, because none of them really know what they're talking about, they always speak in historical analogies rather than about what's actually happening. So they all say the same thing. We want to replicate the 1980s Afghan war Rambo three.

Go ahead. How does that jibe with now? William, is that William Burns, the head of the CIA? Yes, sir. Yeah. Who is the guy who wrote the net means yet? This is why I'm an idiot. I thought.

Hold on. And so that was a memo which warned not to that if we mess around in Ukraine, that Putin had said this was a red line and he didn't say he would go into Kiev, but he said he was ready perhaps to have military action. By the way, interestingly, Burns is quite gung ho about the war. Right. Which is my mistake, because I thought he was going to see Biden through this and prevent the war because I knew that he was the guy who knew better. But The Intercept wrote, writes, U.S. intelligence reports at the time predicted that Kiev would fall quickly, perhaps in a week or two at the most. The prediction spurred the Biden administration to secretly withdraw key U.S. intelligence

assets from Ukraine, including covert blah, blah, blah, meaning that our best intelligence guess was that this was going to last a week or two. So how could they have thought we're going to get them into a quagmire? Right. So that's the whole thing is they assumed from the very beginning, everyone did the CIA official assessments at the time and everything, were that Russia would quickly smash Ukraine's military and the Ukrainian state would cease to exist. That was the presumption. So the plan to create an Afghan-style quagmire assumed that in the first place, that we would be backing essentially radical right-wing militias. I don't

know if you want to get into that, but we will be backing essentially non-governmental militias, Ukrainian-style Mujahideen, in an insurgency against Russia. Hillary Clinton, it's great because they can't interrupt her. She was on MSNBC, and she just started going off, and they just sat there and let her go on and on and on about this, and this is the thinking, and you can read it in the New York Times. There's a great article where it's Helene Cooper. She quotes Admiral Stavridis, who would have been Hillary's secretary of defense. And Stavridis says, well, she's paraphrased. Cooper paraphrases him, saying, we sure don't know how to defeat an insurgency, but we sure know how to back one. And so, and this is, by the way, I think you might remember, but maybe you didn't think about it.

We're talking two months after America's absolutely humiliating, disgraceful defeat and withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years of failing to try to clean up the mess from the last time that we did this. And they also invoke Syria, where, as you know, American support for the Mujahideen 10 years ago led to the rise of the Islamic State Caliphate. And then they had to launch Iraq War Three to blow it up again. And they cite these two wars as the model of what they want to do in Ukraine to prolong the war, to weaken Russia. And let me say one more thing here, pardon me, and then I swear I'll shut up. At the start of the war, Noam, I don't know about you, OK, but me and all and I assume you too,

buddy. But me and all other eight billion people in the world thought we need a ceasefire right now. That's it. We can't have fighting on Russia's border. Whatever is going on where there's hot exchanges of ammunition at Russia's border. Somebody pour a fire extinguisher all over that thing. Find a table. If not in Geneva, find it in Beijing. Find it in Singapore. Find it somewhere. Somebody sit down and talk and end this war. We cannot have a violent conflict on Russia's border. And then but what happened? The Biden government said, oh, yes, we can. We want to extend this thing as long as we can. They said it over and over in The Washington Post and in The New York Times. They said, we're concerned.

We don't want the war to end too quickly. That was in The Washington Post on April the 4th, 2022. Yeah. Well, I don't agree with you completely, but I'm not going to argue with that. By the way, just because you said Syria, good thing Israel took out Syria's nuclear program, correct? Otherwise, who knows? They never had a nuclear program. My wife actually debunked that one back in 06. When they bombed that building, that wasn't really a nuclear facility. She had IAEA sources that debunked that that day. If they had a nuclear program, it would be a good thing if Israel had taken it out, correct? Given the fact that that's... Possibly, but you know what, here's a real world example

of that. Saddam Hussein had a safeguarded nuclear reactor that Israel bombed at Osirak in 1981 and that drove Saddam Hussein's nuclear program underground and turned it from an electricity program into a nuclear weapons program and America only, And America had no idea about it and only discovered it in the aftermath of Iraq War I. So he could have built a nuclear bomb in direct reaction. I know you hate timelines. In direct reaction to Israel launching a preemptive strike against his civilian nuclear facility.

You learn nothing about Israel. Have you learned nothing here? They have eyeballs everywhere. Anyway, can you play the Newland call? No one lets you go. I'm really enjoying it. Are you ever coming to New York? Occasionally.

Hopefully, I'll be doing a lot of traveling in the new year, I think. The YouTube one. YouTube one. You were very succinct about the Newland call here. I'm going to play you, your own words, and I'll tell you why i think you're out to lunch on it and then we will uh we'll say goodbye okay what they call it he held the ukraine brief when he was the vice president under barack obama that meant he was in charge of ukraine policy joe biden well he was in on the coup and we know he was because we got Robert Kagan's wife, Victoria

Newland, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, on the phone saying, I just talked to Jake Sullivan, and he said the vice president's willing, and we're going to get Biden on the phone on a conference call with the participants in the overthrow here to give them an attaboy and make sure that the deets stick. So she's really running Biden's errand as she's plotting the coup d'etat with Jeffrey Pyatt on the phone. Caught red-handed. Two weeks before the coup, they did it anyway. So let me say real quick. First of all, that interview is from before I wrote the book, so I could add probably a little bit more nuance

as far as what I'm explaining there. I would not argue now that that is a perfect answer. Okay. But it ain't far off. Okay. Give me the updated answer. Go ahead. Yeah. So what they're talking about on the phone call is they're discussing the three major

leaders of the protest movement there, which is Yatsenyuk from Yulia Tymoshenko's fatherland party, Klitschko, who's the heavyweight boxer who later became the mayor, and Ola Tannybach from the Social National Party, if you can believe it, who's a proud Hitler-loving Nazi, a proud descendant of the OUN-UPA. And so, Newland here is clearly taking a leading role in deciding, and essentially, as I think Raimondo put it at the time, Justin Raimondo put it at the time, stage managing the revolution and who's to do what. Now, what they're discussing here is they're not saying who's the new president's going

to be, but who the new prime minister is going to be. She wants Yatsenyuk to be the president, and she wants Tanny Bock and Klitschko to be on the outside, essentially supporting them, is what they're discussing. But what's important about it is a couple of things. First of all, there were ongoing negotiations with Yanukovych where he had made an offer to bring the opposition into the government. However, that offer at the time that that phone call is being recorded, that offer had been rejected out of hand by the Maidan leaders. They were holding out for his regime change. So even if the Americans thought that, well, we just want to install essentially our guys in his government.

The plan of the protest leaders was to hold out to get rid of him, and they had rejected his offer right away. And by the way, his offer never included a position for Tannybach anyway. So it's not exactly clear, you know, exactly what she means by that or whether she's discussing maybe another version of the offer different from that. But we do know how it played out and how it played out was the U.S. and the E.U. As she said, we're bringing in Robert Seri, who is Ban Ki-moon's guy. We're bringing in him to help negotiate the thing.

And then we know that the deal that they pushed said that Yanukovych had that, by the way, that Putin forced Yanukovych to sign on to as well, or at least advised him to sign on to as well, promised early elections, which he was sure to lose. But also made him pull his security forces back from the protest on the Maidan. And then I'm not exactly sure what happened, but it looks like the leaders of the security forces ditched town. And then the junior officers jumped on buses and left, too. And so they didn't just withdraw from the Maidan. They withdrew essentially from all the national government buildings. And so on the evening of the 21st, when the protest leaders announced that they had signed this deal

the neo-nazis from right sector and a guy named paris yuck is his name jumps up on the stage and he was identified i show in the book with great sources good journalism you'd like he was the guy pulling triggers from on rifles leading the snipers at the Music Conservatory the morning of the 17th or the 18th. I'm sorry, I forget. But anyway, same guy who was the self-confessed leader of the snipers jumped up on the stage and said, we reject this deal. We will not accept any deal where the criminal stays, and if he doesn't leave town

by 10 a.m. tomorrow, we're going to kill him. I swear to God. And this is a guy who was killing cops already. And it was a credible threat, and even as Andrew Kramer of the New York Times said, this was a credible threat. And it was this credible threat of violence by these neo-Nazi groups. And I'm not saying every single person on the Maidan was a Nazi because they weren't. But some of them were.

The important ones were. And so it was. This is what's called. Look, I don't speak French. Non. But it's a coup de something. It was a street putsch. It was an American-financed, massive protest movement.

I'm not saying, specifically, I am not saying that Newland had the CIA have Paris Yuck get up on that stage and announce that he was going to murder the president. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying the entire thing was an American production from beginning to end. The fact that the neo-Nazis didn't act exactly according to script is almost irrelevant. And I'll say one thing before I shut up, which is that George Friedman, the president of Stratfor, strategic forecasting, which is known as like a private CIA, they consult with very big business and with the Pentagon. They're not just kooks. They're very credentialed foreign policy experts. Friedman, I think, fancies himself a Kissinger, a real politic guy. And he said in an interview with Commercent, which is Boris Berezovsky's former outlet. It's not like a pro-Russian outlet. He said, yeah, yeah. He said it was the most blatant

coup in history. And the lady says, well, what do you mean? The EU deal or the whole thing? And he says the whole thing. America was supporting all those human rights groups, by which he means all those NGOs that were pouring tens of millions of dollars to keep that protest movement going all through December, January and February in the lead up to the revolution. I mean, man, if you put the shoe on the other foot for a minute, you imagine Chinese agents and Chinese parliamentarians, whatever, standing up there, giving a speech on January 6th, encouraging people to stand up and overthrow the government or something like that, intervening, pouring millions of dollars into NGOs, trying to lean one way or the other in our election. Remember in 1996 when a few

Chinese nationals gave like hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bill Clinton. And it was the biggest scandal in the world that there would be foreign money in an American election at all. Here, America is the world superpower. We are the 800 megaton gorilla throwing our weight around, throwing Victoria Nuland, the weight of her gigantic stomach around on those people. OK, but the problem is and then we're going to end with this. I have some little videos thing I did. But, you know, I was very early on.

Unconvinced by Russiagate. Because I detected very early, I mean like really early on, that when I began to look into things, newspaper reports, whatever it was, they were never quite as advertised. And one of the things that really turned me off to this Ukraine story has been, and it might be unfairly turned off to it, just as a kind of like a reflex of mine, which maybe is that this Newland story has been so obviously false for so long. So false is an exaggeration though.

I'll, I'll, I'll make my case and then you tell me where I'm wrong. Okay. So first of all, play the Newland call was a cool thing, Mike. It's quick.

Just, just give me the, give the, this is really not for you. It's for people listening to the podcast. You don't really know the detail. It helps color it in for them this is typical of uh you know what we hear on podcasts and fox news until as you say

she got caught on a tape recorded conversation where she was plotting with the then u.s ambassador to ukraine over exactly which people the u.s wanted to take which positions in the ukrainian government once this elected president was removed. And then after that coup was effectuated, exactly the people that she directed be put into government ended up ruling Ukraine. Several years ago, Toria Newland at the State Department, the woman who's driving our war against Russia, was caught on tape admitting that she had engineered a coup in Ukraine. Was she punished for that? No, she was promoted. Unless they believed

they could do what they did in ukraine well what uh to overthrow the government and put a government and that's more friendly to them yeah i mean they've they've tried to do this before that was the other thing that you were talking about that recording where they were openly discussing the various individuals they had the victoria newland phone call. And it's right around, I think it was leaked, like, it was right around when, right when Yanukovych fled and the new government took over and was immediately recognized by the U.S.

Um, and, uh, she's, she, it starts with, uh, her and Jeffrey Pyatt, who's an ambassador, and they're like, uh, we're in play. Okay, like, it's happening. And then they're all, like, she's talking about who should be in the new government and who should be out of the new government. And then they're talking about how we're going to make this thing stick. Oh, this guy doesn't have the experience.

Yats has to be in. Klitschko has to be out. Like going through all the people and all the players who should be in the new government and who shouldn't. Yeah, man. There's nothing wrong there, bro. When you say that a coup is an exaggeration, saying it's not a coup is an exaggeration. I mean, I don't speak French and I know that there's a coup de main and a coup d'etat and a coup de this and a coup de that. Let me make my case. Let me make my case. They're all each one of them saying, I think I'm being fair. The phone call showed her engineering the coup. But then that's right, though. Just let me say it. And then at the time, I was aware that the New York Times had a contradictory story, but I didn't know what to think.

And I'll just say what the Times had written close to that time. The tape captured a four-minute phone call on January 25th between Victoria Nuland and Jeffrey Pyatt. I'm skipping here. The two were discussing Mr. Yanukovych's offer to bring two opposition leaders, Yatsenyuk and Klitschko, into the government as prime minister and deputy prime minister. So I'm like, OK, the Times is saying they were discussing an offer from Yanukovych, not a coup behind his back, but essentially an answer to his proposition. I said, well, I don't know about that. So just a few days ago, I emailed Robert Wright. I said, Robert, what is the story with this? And he says, well, did you hear my interview with this guy, Kachanovsky,

who is a source in your book for a couple of things? So Kachanovsky actually says, no, they have the call all wrong. But then just two days ago, Lavrov to Tucker actually alludes to the fact that there was this offer. And if only they had taken the offer rather than because what happened was what was Yanukovych's the opposition leader's name? Well, there's Klitschko, Yatsenyuk and Tannybuck. Yatsenyuk, I guess. He said, no, no, we want elections right away. He said, we're not taking the deal.

We want elections right away. But that wasn't what the call the Nuland call was about. So play that other video now, Mike. It's the last video I'm going to play. I don't know if you've seen this. This is Kachanovsky and then Lavrov alluding it to it just a few days with Tucker. And after I see all this, I said, well, this call was just foreign policy. And you mentioned Victoria Nuland, and of course, something that has gotten some attention.

Yes, I think it's important. I also research this issue, and I think it's very likely it was recorded and leaked by Russian intelligence, specifically to kind of implicate the United States, but also it was often misrepresented because according to this phone call, they were discussing not, I don't think they were discussing Ukrainian government after the arrest of Yanukovych. They were talking about basically a proposal by Yanukovych at the time,

a few weeks before the Maidan massacre, to basically offer positions in his government to Maidan opposition leaders. And so specifically, he even was willing to make Yatsenyuk, prime minister of his government, and also to include Klitschko, who was another Maidan leader in his government, basically. And this is why they had discussion. Had the coup in February 2014, had that not happened, and had the deal which was reached the day before,

between the then president and the opposition implemented, Ukraine would have stayed one piece by now with Crimea in it. It's absolutely clear. They did not deliver on the deal. Instead, they staged the coup. The deal, by the way, provided for creation of a government of national unity in February February 2014 and holding early early elections which the then president would would would have lost everybody knew that all right so we have this call which is about this deal and it's not engineering a coup and then you can say that if when the people rise up and there's friction and they demand early elections and whatever happened, Ukraine was a coup.

Well, that's really not how the word coup is usually used. But there's no evidence that we engineered that or even how would we engineer that? You can't get a million people out in the square to demand early elections by spending money on an NGO. Oh, hell yeah. Dude, it's a terribly poor country. Same thing's happening in Georgia right now. It's the best job you could possibly get in the country is working for an NGO. Same thing in Tajikistan and all of these countries.

It's the best money that you can get. For an upper-middle-class professional in Georgia, you work for an NGO, or you get a real job. And money plays a huge role in this. But look, let's break this down about the coup, OK? Because I don't speak French. I know there's coup de this and coup de that. A coup d'etat is usually when like the generalissimo murders the presidente and takes his place. Something like that. Right. And there's a coup de main. Usually not an early election. It's usually not an early election.

OK, well, there's a coup de main is when like Hussein rolls into Kuwait or Putin takes Crimea. One big swift surprise attack type thing and you win. There could be 10 different types of coup de this or coup de that. I don't speak French and I don't know exactly all the rules. I know this is essentially was essentially a street putsch within the context of a massive protest movement that was bankrolled by the West and by American NGOs the whole time. And I have no evidence of that. Oh, come on. You're not at that part of the book yet is all you're really admitting there.

You send me you send me after this the page. Oh, it's all in there. and i'll and i will put i will cut it into the video but go ahead okay all right wait go ahead look you you read through my treatment on the maidan revolution and the lead up to it and then we could do a whole other interview about what you think about that you're just not at that part of the book yet that's fair it's a long book okay but here's the thing about it okay again we're talking about the American superpower versus some pipsqueak bankrupt country, OK? And so it's a coup de something, man, when the American ambassador to the EU and the American ambassador to Ukraine, this weak country, are saying, listen, we got to glue it. We got to stick it. We got to midwife it.

We got to make it sail before Putin can torpedo it. Do you understand? Obama himself said this was a transition of government in Ukraine that we were brokering. We were. And as I already stipulated to you, Vladimir Putin got on the phone and told Yanukovych to sign the deal. Okay? So it's a coup de something where the Russians even agreed with the Americans and the EU that they wanted to force through this transition because at least it's better than the chaos

taking place there. But to say that, oh, this couldn't possibly amount to a coup de anything because all you have is the most powerful woman on the face of the earth picking winners and losers for the new regime. She was not. There was a there was an agreement on the table and they're discussing who will be the opposition to be nothing. She's deciding, Noam.

She's not discussing a damn thing. She is the one calling the shots. Fair enough. I will grant you that. Wait, let me say one more thing about that. Dan Murphy from the Christian Science Monitor is a Russia expert and hates Putin. He is a totally anti-Russia guy, but he has a treatment on this where he says, man, this is a breathtaking amount of weight being tossed around by the United States, making these decisions for this foreign country. And he is the furthest thing from a Russia apologist of any kind, Dan Murphy. But he says, come on, man, listen, of course, it wasn't just

a simple coup where America hired a general to kill the president and step into his shoes. But it was a street putsch. It was what Democrats call an insurrection. And it was financed by foreign powers, us. I got to stop you. I'm going to speak your language here because I conceded too much. First of all, this phone call was leaked, was like two and a half minutes or three minutes, right? Four minutes, four minutes.

Now, we know that there's a reason that the rest of the call wasn't leaked, but actually, no, it's essential. It sounds like a complete call and they never disputed the authenticity of it at all. And in fact, they confirmed it. Hold on. It's authentic. And they never said it was edited. Just let me speak. It is obviously edited because it starts in the middle and it ends in the middle. There's no hello. There's no greeting. There's no, there's no goodbye. Now we've seen, and I know you and I see eye to eye. We saw that Georgia phone call where Trump says, find me 20,000 votes or whatever it was. And everybody who heard that is sure that Trump was pressuring the guy to create votes, but you can go watch, you can go listen to the whole call on YouTube. And after I listened to the whole call, I was like, oh, this is bullshit.

That's not, that's not what it sounded like at all. So maybe she was calling the shots. We don't know what went before. We don't know what went after. But the fact is, when Ukraine, which is about to join some sort of cooperation with the European Union, turned back towards Russia, there was an organic protest movement. No. Organic, my balls. Give me a break, we believe that i absolutely do believe it because how do you get how do you get 200 started with 200 000 people it swelled to

almost a million how do you get you can't i started it works for george soros you can't for hardrassky tv which is a four it'd be like it would be like if the leader of rt in america called for a giant protest against Joe Biden. And you go, oh, that's completely organic. Give me a break, dude. It is not either. We would have a lot of evidence. We would have testimonies.

It's all in the book. The guy's name is Nayim whatever. He's from Hamdraski TV. All the money comes from George Soros and the NED for all of those so-called independent media groups. You get 800,000 people to go out and protest against something they don't believe. Well, it's not that they all don't believe it. It's just that who's making the whole thing possible. Who's cooking them meals? Who's cooking them meals for 200,000 meals cooked?

Who's they handed out? Let me finish here. Let me finish. America held a carnival for these people for two and a half months, okay? They had stage shows every night. They had hot food. They had polystyrene foam boards and blankets for everyone to sleep. Tents. This is all foreign, paid for. Every bit of it paid for by the United States of America.

You sound like the Zionist complaining about the college protests, saying that the students are paid for, the of it paid for by the United States of America. You sound like the Zionist complaining about the college protests saying that. No, that's not true. Look, the thing is, right? Exactly the same arguments. And they have. And you know what? They could be true or they might be false. I want to see the proof.

I don't. If there's 800000 people show up for something, there's going to be testimony from 100 people saying, this guy told me to come out. This guy paid me. This guy, this, here's the leaflet I got. We trace it back. Here's the thing. You keep interrupting me too much, so I don't ever get to finish my thought here, Noam. Listen, stop.

Stop talking for a second. Listen, OK? A lot of Ukrainians hate Russia. Of course they do. But they are extras in America's movie here. This isn't about them. This is about a power play between Washington, D.C. and Moscow. As they're discussing in that phone call, America is having its way in Ukraine.

This has nothing to do with supporting democracy, supporting the will or the wishes of the American people. This is about the American—pardon me, the Ukrainian people. This is about American government officials choosing what they think is good for them, for their policy. And Victoria Nuland might say, oh, I can feel the spirit of the whole of Ukraine with me. Well, that's not true. Half the population was opposed to what was going on.

So the fact of the matter is, even in the East, you have people who hate Russia, maybe in the East, even a little bit more, because they're more worried about being subsumed into Russia. But that still doesn't make them not sock puppets when the global superpower is pouring in tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to support all the groups that are making their entire thing possible. Go back to January 6th. OK, imagine if all those groups, if that went on for months and months and months and they were financed to the tunes of tens of millions of dollars by China or Russia. Would you sit there and say, come on, Scott, are you telling me there's no real MAGA supporters

in America? Nobody really likes Trump. It's all sock puppetry. It's all a coup. And I would say, no, of course, America. Nobody really likes Trump. It's all sock puppetry. It's all a coup. And I would say, no, of course, there are Americans who prefer Trump. But this is clearly a foreign influence operation. OK, OK. I don't know.

But, you know, coincidentally, people like Tucker Carlson, who very much agree with what you're saying now, they also say that January 6th was a sock puppet operation. And I don't think there's proof. I'm not so certain of that, although I think it is admitted that there were many more FBI informants inside the thing than was originally admitted. And it raises questions of whether they were being more provocateurs than simply informants. Although I wouldn't put the whole thing on them. I'm consistent. I don't see. I saw January 6th. There may have been FBI agents there. I think we know conclusively there were some.

But those people, if that was the mirror image, that would not have been a coup. That would have been FBI agents were there, but it was an organic movement. I didn't stop you. Wait, wait, I'm sorry, Christopher, what's his name, from Connecticut up there? It's in the book. Forgive me. But anyway, you have American senators up there saying, we are with you.

We support you. On stage with them. You have, again, all of this money. Noam, if China or Russia were waging a financial effort to support an American protest movement occupying downtown Washington, D.C., dude, we would be at DEFCON 1. We would never take that for a moment. That's a different issue. There's no question we would say this is foul and we shouldn't allow it. But we would still have to ask ourselves the question whether or not what happened was an organic expression of the will of the people or was it marionetted? Was it was it puppetry? And yet every time America overthrows it, wait, every time America overthrows a government, it's not like we parachute white

boys in there to run the place. We hire the guys that we want. Okay. So every time that we overthrow a government, which is like 50 times or 75 times since World War II, it's to the benefit of some factions at the expense of others. That doesn't mean that it's organic. It's the CIA. There was martial law in Korea a couple of weeks ago. I'm sure we were having phone calls there. I'm sure we have people on the ground.

I'm sure we have our nose in everywhere i don't know if i don't i i would need to see proof of what you're saying that's all i'm saying they had a they had an election some number of weeks after all this happened by all accounts it was a fair election no the east was excluded porschenko won the East was entirely excluded from that vote, almost entirely. So maybe I don't know if I'm democratic about that. That's like, oh, yeah, we had a fair vote, but everybody east of the Mississippi River wasn't allowed to participate. Other than that, it was great, though. OK, fair enough. I don't I might be speaking about something I don't know. I had read when I prepared that this this was considered to be a fair election. All right. Listen, he did agree that he would seek peace, and then he betrayed that and doubled down on the war as soon as he won.

Yeah. All right, we're going to wrap it up. We definitely had our nose in there, and that definitely does cause umbrage. I get that. And we don't like it if people have their nose in our affairs, and we have this notion that there's, like, mature nations that would be respected,

and then there's kind of influx nations like Ukraine that are kind of like open season for all the John Licari type machinations that go on in the world. And that's what Ukraine is. There is a leap to me from that and acknowledging it's true to saying that we engineered a coup, meaning that it wouldn't have happened otherwise. I'm open to that. I just need proof. Listen, we got to go. No, you have to go. No, go ahead. Go ahead. I got one more. I always forget the last word. Go ahead. You can have it. You can have it. The most famous CIA coup was against Mohamed Mossadegh in 1953 in Iran, right? Now,

it wasn't Americans who inherited the power. It was the Shah Reza Pahlavi and his family were reinstalled in power. He was the former dictator, got his old job back. And Ray S. Kline, I quote this in the book, Ray S. Kline, who was the chief of the Directorate of Operations in the CIA, he said something very close to, well, you know, when it comes to covert action, it's all about a light touch on the margin, just enough to make the difference. That's what makes effective covert action. So you don't need the CIA to tell every

man with a rifle to do everything that he's doing. What you got to do is you got to make sure that the party you favor in Greece has enough money to win the next election. And you got to make sure that if they lose, then the commies get assassinated or something happens, a corruption scandal breaks out or something happens to make sure that the faction you don't favor stays out and the faction that you do favor stays in. And so there are various degrees of sock puppetry there. You may be aware America overthrew the prime minister of Australia at one point because he was a little, he was, it's in the book. He was a little too ornery and independent. And so they engineered his removal. Now they didn't kill him.

They didn't have a general murder him and arrest him and throw him in prison. There's not an exact French term for what they did, but the Americans came in and told the Australian government, get rid of this guy for us. And they did. So you call that a coup de what? That's a coup de Victoria Nuland's equivalent, throwing her gigantic the weight of her gigantic stomach around and and having her way. And so that's it doesn't have to be where a literal CIA agent is literally the one who kidnaps the guy and puts him on a plane and flies him away. There are various degrees of how these things operate. You understand? Two things. What can be true isn't necessarily true. You're creating scenarios. They could be true. But I want to go back to my first point, which was as a consumer of news who has a certain principle about the way I judge who's credible and who's not. If these voices that I played for you at the beginning, and there were many more, if they had said to me in the beginning that this call regarded this power sharing agreement,

if they were really upfront about what that call was about, as the New York Times had reported, then I say, oh, I can trust these people. But since I know they weren't, they kind of exaggerated to your credit. You didn't just now, but they all did. I no longer trust them to not be spinning and a little spin goes a long way that's really dave is my fault because dave got that from me when i was maybe oversimplifying it earlier so he gets off the hook there but but overall look i think you know if if tucker uh you know possibly oversimplified in that clip okay i think greenwald was safe the way that greenwald phrased that i don't think was too far off of, of what's going on here again. And I, and I urge your audience to listen, but not one of the mentions, not one of them.

We got to make it, we got to glue it. We got to midwife it. We got to make it, we got to do this thing. Oh no, need a body bag. No, but, but what none of them did was say there was a power sharing agreement they were discussing. Nobody, listen, this is my standard for everything. You know why I know someone's being straight with me? This is how I know someone's being straight with me. If somebody tells me something and they don't leave out anything where if I heard it,

I would say, wait a second, you didn't tell me that. It's a very simple standard. Then I know they're being straight with me. If there's something- If there's something- Look, if there's something- I think you're just missing a detail there. But Norm, you're being unfair. You're being uncharitable to them

and saying that they're being dishonest when what's really happening is they heard her say, I want Yatsenyuk to be the prime minister. And then they saw him be appointed prime minister two weeks later after the violent street push. And they went, oh, oh i get it and by the way one more thing here and this comes from that same clip or should be the same episode of dave on the rogan show dave smith on the rogan show where he has rogan play the clip and i again urge

your entire audience to look at this it's gideon rose the editor of foreign affairs magazine on the old colbert show it's great there's the magazine foreign affairs now on the old Colbert show. That's great. There's the magazine, Foreign Affairs. Now, Gideon, help me out here. We've got a battle. The Ukraine, some of them want to go into the EU, the European Union, and some of them want to stay with Russia. If the Ukraine's not in Europe right now,

what continent is it on? Well, it's part of Eurasia, but it's part of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc. It's basically Robin to Russia's Batman. And the challenge here is to try to attract it to the West, to get it to flip sides. So the rebels in the streets, what are they fighting for? They're fighting for a better future. Countries have a development.

That sounds like a political speech. No, but it's actually true. Countries have to development... That sounds like a political speech. No, but it's actually true. Countries have to develop over time. And Ukraine, basically, after the end of the Soviet Union, faced two tracks. It could stay a sort of stagnant, corrupt, authoritarian country tied to Russia,

or it could essentially join the West. It could modernize, liberalize, become a democracy. At the last minute, when it looked like it was going to trade up from its sort of abusive relationship with its boyfriend from the hood to a nice yuppie... You're not loading these choices in any way whatsoever. It's actually true. When it looked like it was going to trade up to a better environment, at the last minute,

Putin offered a bribe. How much? $15 billion. That's a lot of cash, man. It's a lot of cash. And the president, who himself was tied to the old elites and the eastern part of the country who ties to Russia, decided to back off the change and go join Russia.

Do you know how many pirate-themed restaurants you can buy with $15 billion? The problem was the western parts of the country and the younger parts of the country and the more modern liberal parts of the country basically knew that they had no future being Russia's vassal, and so they took to the streets. Is America taking sides in this in any way? If these people, the rebels are winning right now, right?

Yes, just recently. So why isn't Obama spiking the ball in the end zone and calling Putin and saying, hey, you might have won the medal count, but we won the country count, biatch. It's actually a very good question, and the answer is that we don't want Russia to intervene

and kick over the table like a game of Risk and take Ukraine back. Would they do that? Could he send in troops? Yes, he could. So we are choosing... Does Ukraine have any troops of their own? Would they fight back? Yes, but we don't want this to escalate, and we don't want Russia to crack down. So we want to basically distract Russia.

Oh, look, you have the highest medal count. Oh, you did really well. And focus on the Olympics. There's a shiny object. Let's just take an entire country away from you. Holy shit. Isn't that funny? There's a power vacuum right now. There's a power vacuum. The opposition is all together, which everybody, it's easy to agree on getting rid of the bad old regime and much harder to create a stable country in which everybody compromises and moves forward. But they need a strong leader to move the country forward.

Do you know who's always good at a moment like that? Vladimir Putin. Do you think he might volunteer to come in and help Ukraine find its way? The reason we don't want... We don't want Putin to get involved in this, and so we are basically... We want to try and involve him in this decision

so that he allows Ukraine to go. We actually want to not... We want to say we want a non-exclusive relationship with Ukraine. You can have a relationship with it, too. You're the only one making this into a girlfriend-boyfriend relationship. Ukraine is basically choosing its future

between two completely different courses of action, and we're trying to blur that choice so the old boyfriend doesn't get too upset. Jesus Christ. So what he's saying is, look, Ukraine is Robin to Russia's Batman. Ukraine is Russia's girlfriend. But we're trying to get her to move up from her ghetto boyfriend to a nice yuppie from the suburbs, he says.

We're trying to take, he says it explicitly, we are taking Ukraine away from Russia. And then, and Colbert says, well, but how come Obama's not spiking the football and laughing in Putin's face? And he says, well, we're doing it right now. Again, shades of Newland saying we're getting away with it while he's distracted with the Sochi Olympics. Now, parentheses, why is he spending tens of billions of dollars on the Sochi Olympics? Because he's trying to suck up to you. That's why he's trying to suck up to the West is why he was even doing that. And then but what? And then he says he says, if we if we get away with it quickly and we don't mock him, then we'll get away with it.

But if we do mock him, then he could tip over the whole risk board and send in the troops. And Colbert says, oh, he could send in the troops? And Gideon Rose says, yeah, he could. That's why we're so smart and we're so clever to do it the way we did it during the Olympics. And Colbert says, oh, look at the shiny medals. Never mind that we're running away with an entire country away from you. And Gideon Rose says, that's right, Stephen. Basically, that's exactly what we're doing here.

I'll do you a solid and I'll cut that clip into this interview before I post it. Great. I was afraid I was going to get under your skin the way Neil Ferguson obviously did. But I think we actually had we actually had a good conversation. So I really appreciate it. I hope to have you on again or meet you in person. Mike, our sound guy, I think he has to go. Sorry, Mike.

Don't disconnect until you have 100% uploaded. You know the drill, right? I know the drill. Hey, listen, I'd love to talk to you again after you're done reading the thing and see what you think then. Yeah, and if you want to call my attention to anything in particular, please email me. All right, Scott Horton, everybody, buy his book. It is actually very, very good. I'm not just buttering him up.

My eyes roll over with boring books, and this jumps along. It's very, very good. If you want to know what's happening in Ukraine, get this book, and then get a book on the other side, and then judge for yourself. Thank you for saying so, Noam. I appreciate that. Take it easy. Bye-bye. you you