The Duran Podcast - NATO Escalation & Propaganda - Glenn Greenwald, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

NATO Escalation & Propaganda - Glenn Greenwald, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Hi, everyone. Glenn Dyson here, and I'm joined today by Alexander Mercuris and also Glenn Greenwald, who has on several occasions done the world with his excellent reporting. And, yeah, the topic we really wanted to discuss with you today was escalation in Ukraine and what seems to be the media's excitement, or at least a very supportive role towards his end. As we see now, well, Ukraine is very much exhausted. The front lines appear to be collapsing, and we see that the NATO response has been to send long-range weapons to strike inside Russian territory. The French are rumored to send troops, and across Europe we are looking at how to squeeze some more bloods out of the Ukrainians by either encouraging Ukraine to a lower conscription age for its soldiers, but also we're now speaking openly about deporting Ukrainian refugees to refill the trenches.

So I guess my first question would be, what are the strategic thinking here in terms of where is this going? Are there any more steps on the escalation ladder after this? And how is even a NATO victory defined from your perspective? Well, first of all, thank you for having me back. It's great to talk to you guys again. You know, I'm big fans of the work that you do. So I'm always happy to come on. I think this question really goes to the heart of the problem, which is at the beginning of the war,

when the Russians sent this large force into Ukraine, NATO and the United States made these sweeping proclamations about their war aims and how they defined victory. They didn't say that they wanted to prevent the Ukrainians from conquering or the Russians from conquering Ukraine. They didn't say they wanted to expel the Russians from this new territory that they were now occupying. They made these maximalist proclamations. about how victory would be defined, namely expelling every Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which the Russians have occupied and actually annexed since 2014 in response to the coup that the West helped engineer in Kiev, and which Russia,

by all accounts, considers existentially important to their own defense in light of these incursions into Ukraine, by NATO, and by the West. And so that has always been the question, is given the essential impossibility of achieving those war aims, given what the Russians would do, which is pretty much anything, to prevent themselves from being completely expelled from all of Ukraine, including Crimea, which the Russians don't consider part of Ukraine, but NATO does. There was always essentially no way out because the Russians could not and would not accept defeat as defined by NATO. but NATO basically could not endure the humiliation of losing to Russia in the eyes of the entire world if Russia ends up with even a single inch of Ukrainian territory.

And now two and a half years later, what is happening is what so many people predicted. It may have taken a long time. It may have looked for a few months like it might not happen, but it was always inevitable, given the size advantage that the Russians have over the Ukrainians, given the importance of Ukraine to Russia relative to NATO. NATO that the Russians are now not only holding their own in these 20% or 23% of Ukrainian territory, but are clearly now advancing, breaking through Ukrainian front lines. And so what I think you're seeing from NATO and the West is this kind of desperation,

this idea that Russia is about to do something that we cannot tolerate. And so we're going to do or threaten to do things that are crazy, insane, extremely dangerous, things that we even two and a half years ago wouldn't have considered, like authorizing the use of American weapons for striking inside Ukraine or even, or inside Russia, or even threatening to deploy NATO troops, to Ukrainian soil to fight the Russians directly, which be World War III, because the West painted itself into this corner that they now can't get out of. The thing that I find quite astonishing about this whole situation, I think you've defined the problem. I think that the trap that the West has walked into. But what I find astonishing

is that it is all happening against a completely silent debate. There isn't any debate. We've had threats from the Russians for enormously powerful retaliation against Western countries if there is a missile strikes, cruise missile strikes upon their country. President Putin has made a very strong warning, given a very strong warning, while he was in a trip to Uzbekistan, he's reminded the United States that if we get into a situation where there's this kind of strikes and counter strikes between NATO and the West, he's reminded the United States that strategic nuclear parity exists between Russia and the United States.

We're having talk about strikes on a nuclear superpower, which is making those kinds of, giving these kind of warnings. And the Western media, the general media, remains silent. I don't know to what extent this has been the case in the United States, but in Britain, there's been barely any editorialising upon this, hardly any opinion commentary. It is not the topic of much discussion on television. All of this is going on in a vacuum. And I find this most astonishing, very bizarre, and I get the sense that it's being done, precisely because someone doesn't want there to be a big discussion

amongst the Western public as these terrifying decisions get made. I mean, what are your thoughts about this? You know, when I was doing the reporting that was enabled by our heroic whistleblowing source Edward Snowden, I ended up reporting in multiple countries around the world because these documents are so important for so many countries. And what I always said once I did that at the end was for everything that is terrible about Western elites and Western media and Western propaganda, it's always a measure worse, if not more so, in the UK. It's kind of the epitome of everything wrong with Western culture and Western propaganda and Western elite thought. And I think in the UK, there's been this long time, centuries-old kind of Russia phobia.

and then you add to that this kind of, I think, national sense of impotence that we used to be a great empire and now we just kind of followed the United States long when they let us like a little puppy dog. And so having people write columns and make pronouncements about the victories, the glories of war is kind of a way to psychologically compensate for that, which is one of the reasons I think things are so closed off there and always so pro-war there. But I think more broadly, and this is one of the things on which I focus most in the first couple of weeks after the Russian invasion because as an American, I've seen this so many times as a country that sells wars so often to its population, which then invariably comes to regret those wars, is the war propaganda in the first few weeks is so emotional, so primal, so directed to our most primitive faculties, and it's been perfected over decades, so it's very effective. And then you add on, add on to that, not just the government, but the media that works hand in hand with them, that you get people

so riled up that they really don't actually stop and think, wait a minute, what is the benefit to me or the effect on my life over the question of who governs certain provinces in eastern Ukraine or in Crimea? Why would I be willing to spend enormous amounts of money and risk escalation with the largest nuclear arm? There's none of that rational thought or debate. Everything is so emotional. This is the new Hitler. The Ukrainians are, you know, purely innocent. This is one of the gravest war crime. in decades, one of the most dangerous countries on the planet, if not the most dangerous. We, you know, in the United States, have been feeding on anti-Russian animus for at least eight years since the Democrats decided to blame their loss in 2016, not on themselves, but ultimately

on Vladimir Putin. And so there's been this idea that the Moscow is the root of all evil, and anybody has a result, especially in that early part of the war, but even since, who tried to raise any of these questions about how this can possibly be a result. achieve without a risk of escalation so enormous that no rational person would assume it obviously got called a Russian agent and not only called a Russian agent, put on official list issued by the Ukrainians. I was on many of these that said these are the people who are guilty of spreading Russian disinformation on behalf of the Kremlin and those sorts of things. And for a lot of people, that is a very daunting threat to be called that in public, be vilified in that way. It's a

deterrent for a lot of people to do it. We did see finally some, I guess, conflict or tension when largely the right-wing populist in the House of Representatives in the United States resisted and held up another $60 billion in aid for six months or so based on all these realities. But finally, those tactics worked and they capitulated and sent another $60 million over there. And ever since that happened, we're back to almost no debate. even while the dangers of the war escalate and the prospects for the Ukrainians worsened and worsened. I noticed the same, though, that the government, all of NATO, as well as the media, they kind of recognized for more than two years that sending long-range missiles to strike Russian territory

or sending troops would be effectively something that would likely trigger World War III. And then once the decision was made to actually do this, overnight, it became unproblematic. And it seems as if the media took this role of effectively trying to sell this to the public as what we warned about yesterday is today completely unproblematic. But it, yeah, this is I guess one of my concerns, this absence of dissidents in the media. But also I'm curious. I don't understand quite often the strategic thinking because I've seen now both from the United States but also from Europe where they're encouraging the Chinese to put pressure on Russia. Even at the same time as various American leaders, many actually have made the point that if we can just knock out the Russians, we can put all our focus and resources against the Chinese.

So at some point, obviously, if you have a divide and conquer, you can't go after both at the same time. It doesn't feel like someone is really behind the wheel anymore. This is punching a bit around in each direction. This seems new to me at least. It's so fascinating because during the 70 years, let's say, of the Cold War following World War II, the, we could say 50 years of the Cold War, the primary objective was twofold. One was to avoid any direct combat with or direct wars with the Soviet Union, the United States, States. It was often done through proxies. It was often done through coups and the like, but the United States and the

Soviet Union managed to avoid having any direct conflict because the one time they got near it, which was under Cuban Missile Crisis, we came extremely close to blowing up the entire world. It was very possible that that could have happened. But then the other strategic objective that Washington understood had to be paramount was they wanted desperately avoid driving China and Russia, China and the Soviet Union, into some sort of an alliance. They wanted constantly to keep them wedged. And over the last five years, primarily because of the war in Ukraine, but other factors as well, we've achieved the result that we've, even during the Cold War we managed to avoid,

of driving Russia and China together. And I think one of the motives that is driving Washington, and it's kind of elusive, but I think it's very dominant. And it's very similar to the psychological motive I attributed to British elites as well, is that obviously after World War two and then again, following the end of a Cold War, the United States had this predominance in this world, this unchallenged dominance is the world's only superpower. Americans are inculcated to believe that when we fight wars, we always win them, that our wars are just.

And there is now, obviously, a multipolar world. China is a very powerful country, militarily, economically, economically. They have succeeded in breaching multiple regions where the United States was always dominant in Africa, in South America, in Asia. And one of their ways that they are exploiting that this resentment against the United States is to say that a multipolar world is necessary to prevent the United States from bullying everybody with wars, with sanctions, with demands, with dictates. And most of the world, most of the world, I would say, has bought into that. And the war in Ukraine is a perfect kind of example of what the Chinese have been warning against. And I think that so much of this is this fear that Americans have and then therefore, Western Europeans have that they're losing their dominance.

And a loss to Russia would kind of be the nail in the final, the coffin of that paranoia. And I think you're exactly right that there is no strategic thinking behind it. I mean, we know that Russia will never permit victory to be to be achieved in the way NATO to find it. They obviously know that too. They've known that even before the war. There were all kinds of foreign policy elites in Washington who for decades have been saying Ukraine is of the utmost vital interest to Russia.

They'll go to war if they feel threatened through Ukraine by the West. And it's never been a vital interest to the West. And they proceeded to do it anyway. And I think the idea was, well, we can provoke the war, the Russians. into this one of these wars of atrophy, similar to what they did to us in Afghanistan and what we did to them in Afghanistan that caused so much damage.

But the problem is that China understands very well, obviously, that they're building a multipolar world, one that they can play a big part in leading, and they're not going to help the United States destroy Russia and reassert its dominance in the world, which is why they've been standing behind Russia from the start, as have other countries, of alleviating the sanctions and helping the Russian war efforts,

and will continue to do so. And so I don't know, I honestly don't know what Washington is thinking. I just know that whatever it is is not rational. I think you touch on a very important point, because you're absolutely right about Britain. We've never had the kind of democratic, let's call it democratic culture in our media. Even in our politics, we were in Britain, the imperial power,

as you absolutely rightly say, that has instilled it. us certain attitudes, which to some extent, to a great extent, still govern what we do. But it seems to me that the United States is copying this very same bad example. And it is in the process of undermining such democratic traditions and institutions as it used to have. And we could see this in everything, because public debate is being limited. as you said, it's very, very difficult to speak out and discuss foreign policy. These extraordinary decisions, these incredibly dangerous decisions,

assisting in the launch of missiles against the territory of a foreign superpower. There's very little discussion about the relationship between China and Russia and what it means and what alternative policies there are. The media in the United States, the wider media, doesn't really talk about these things as they should, And of course, all this comes alongside all kinds of other techniques of debate suppression and cutting off of discussion which take place in the United States, which in effect, undermine democracy and the processes of democracy in the United States in exactly the same way that they have.

done and are doing in Britain. And as an American, I'm sure you are worried about it. But it always surprises me that so few Americans seem to be. I think if we look back in history generally the way power centers acquire authoritarian power with the consent often of the population is by, it's a very simple formula. You scare the population into believing that there's some external threat that threatens our group, our trust. We are tribal beings after all. We evolved through tribal membership and tribal identity and protecting our tribe against external threats. And if you can successfully depict a certain country as being or certain terrorist group or whatever

as being so threatening to our group, the members of that group will essentially authorize the government, acquiesce on the government doing anything in the name of keeping you safe from it. It was really fascinating to watch after 2016 the Democrats were kind of. I think 2016 was really the crucial year that you have to look at because it had these dual traumas to Western liberalism, first where British voters decided they wanted to leave the EU. And then on top of that four months later, American voters defied everything that was expected of them and what they were told to do and elected Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. And I think that was when you really saw the emergence of things like this fake credential overnight fabricated of disinformation expert.

these groups that purported to be able to identify disinformation that justified political censorship by making them seem, giving them the facade of something apolitical and scientific, even though you look at always who funds these groups and they always have the same ideology and the same agenda, they often describe as disinformation, things that are true and vice versa.

It's all an attempt to control the flow of information because they believe 2016, the lesson that Western elites derived from that is that we cannot allow the free flow of information over the internet especially. we can't allow people to speak freely because when they do, they get too disobedient. They get too difficult to control. And one of the most striking things to me that is almost never discussed is almost

immediately after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2020, the EU enacted a law that made it criminal for any platforms to host Russian state media. So if you're an adult in the EU and you want to understand what the Russian government is saying you want to hear for yourself their version of events. You just kind of had a curiosity or intellectual interest, want to hear what you can't. Platforms are banned from hosting Russian state media. And of course, in the United States, the fear of Russia and Russian disinformation and interference in an election has been the primary means of justifying a huge array of corporate and state censorship. And I think if you look back at 9-11, very similar things happen.

where previously unthinkable measures suddenly became things people were willing to acquiesce to because of the fear of 9-11 and the trauma of it, the claims that we needed these things in order to keep people safe from future threats. That is the role that Russia has been serving in the West to kind of be an all-purpose justification for everything governments and power centers want to do, including once again trying to control the flow of information in political debates that take place over the Internet. Can I just follow up on that? I mean, has it occurred to people in the United States then, as it did in Britain, by the way, increasingly, even before the First World War, especially the Labour movement, the working class political movements then, that empire and democracy are incompatible things, that you can't have both at the same time, if you are an empire, a great power that wields.

power over others, which is what an empire is, even if you don't have direct colonies, that is inevitably going to create structures and requirements within your own country, which are incompatible with free debate, free discussion, the ability to conduct open political systems, which is what a democracy ultimately is. And if we, since you brought up the subject of Britain, That is one of the reasons why there was always a very strong anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist current within the Labour movement and within the working class movement in Britain because they understood very well that to the extent that this existed, this whole framework existed, it stood in the way of their own progress within Britain itself.

Is there any understanding of this in the United States that again you're going in that direct that this power structure that you've created, the fact that people like Donald Trump have to be prevented from becoming presidents because it affects policy and all that kind of thing is exactly the kind of thing that people in Britain fought with some success for a long time to stop.

Well, it's so interesting. Obviously, the history of Britain is very tied up with the idea of colonialism and imperialism. But when the American founders were able to liberate themselves from the rule of the British crown, one of the things that they set out to do was to ensure that the United States would never be a country that involved itself an unnecessary foreign entanglement. This was foundational to the United States' view of itself in the world. In fact, George Washington, the first American president, when he left office in his farewell address, gave this remarkably prescient speech about how crucial it is for the United States. days to have no enduring alliances or bitter adversaries or enemies that just went on and on

because that would ensure our constant involvement in the rest of the world's business. And there has always been this strain, even through the 20th century, there were people opposed to a U.S. involvement in World War I, and they ended up being criminalized for it with a new law, the Espionage Act in 1917, that is still used today. And then there was a strain of people who were opposed for a long time to U.S. involvement in World War II on the grounds that we weren't in danger. Now, that is a more isolationist strain, but certainly in the 60s of the Vietnam War and in the 70s and 80s, with all these wars that the U.S. was fighting in the name of the Cold War, there was a major strain on the American left and a non-trivial stain on

the American right that both thought that these kinds of interference and involvement in the rest of the world were not just unnecessary, but counter-destructive to the kind of country we were, to our own national interest. And then fascinatingly, when Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, one of his main planks that he ran on was the fact that the foreign policy establishment in Washington had become loyal to essentially everyone but American citizens, that there were these endless wars, these foreign wars. This is one of the reasons why particularly kind of war mongers and neocons turned against him who had been attached to the Republican Party. They recognized that he was a threat to that dogma. He was, amazingly, the first president, whatever else he wanted to say about him,

in decades, the first American president, not to initiate a new American war. He inherited some wars, but from Obama, and he escalated a couple of them in terms of the bombing campaign against ISIS, but he initiated no new wars, got the United States involved in no new wars, the first American president in decades. So if you look at polling data, there's absolutely this strain of thought, say should the United States be the world's policemen? Should or do we get involved in too many other? People overwhelmingly will say, no, we should be the world's policemen. Yes, we get involved in too many wars. The problem is, and this is kind of the genius of Western propaganda. I know it exists in the UK, too, certainly in the United States, is that in a lot of ways imperialism has been defined as a battle

for democracy. So, for example, when it was time for the United States to get involved in the war in Ukraine, the government, the media, were able to convince people that we were going to, there to defend democracy in Ukraine and therefore the rest of the world against the tyranny of Russia. And nothing drives me more insane than the ability of the British elites to convince the British people that they are in the world with foreign policy, fighting for democracy and against tyranny. United States is doing the same when the United States and the UK count among their closest, the most important allies, some of the most savage and brutal dictatorships on the planet, including one set they helped impose after overthrowing the democratically elected one.

And so when you compare the reality of what the United States and Great Britain have been doing in the world with the propaganda that, oh, we fight democracy and for freedom, the disparity is so glaring. But again, I think this kind of propaganda appeals to people. People want to believe that about their government. They want to believe that about their country, that we're out there doing good things in the world, that we represent freedom and democracy. and we fight wars to liberate other people. And so, you know, even though people in principle in the abstract are very much opposed to the idea of having more wars and being involved in foreign countries, whenever a particular new war gets sold, the propaganda is so heavy like it was in Russia and Ukraine.

I mean, a lot of Americans didn't even think about Ukraine their whole lives. They didn't know where it is. They didn't know what it was. But because this propaganda was so intense and so immersive, the majority of Americans, supported American involvement in the war in Ukraine, even though they now don't. It's quite interesting going. In the 19th century, the British quite similarly pushed the idea. Many of the leading liberals that are pushed the idea of liberal hegemony.

That is, the spread of liberalism did not necessarily contradict hegemon, sorry, empire. But empire was indeed an instrument for liberalism. So liberal imperialism was, again, not an oxymoron, but as a legitimate instrument. And I feel that we kind of made this an ideology again after the Cold War because, well, we don't call it liberal empire. Now it's liberal hegemony. But this whole idea that the ability of the world to transform itself towards more benign values, it's all conditioned on the ability of the West to maintain this collective hegemony. And of course, that's why I think we see all.

conflicts in the world. It does matter. Nobody needs really to know anything about the country, find it on the map, because we already know that everything has to be interpreted or filtered through this lens of liberal democracy versus authoritarian totalitarianism. Of course, we have compliant medias and this government-funded NGOs to make sure that the civil society does not deviate too far from the state. But what we're seeing now, though, is reality on the ground, it no longer reflect this because hegemony is gone. Obviously, the United States wanted hegemony. The Europeans, we were dreaming of having, you know, collectively having parity with the United States

so we could have collective hegemony. That dream didn't really go anywhere. But now, obviously, we have new centers of power emerging. What do you see being required to snap out of this ideological, jail we created for ourselves because we really paint ourselves in the corner because we can't pursue policies which will be in our own interest it seems

because the ideology has committed us to defending an empire or a hegemony which is already gone. Yeah, I mean, it is so hard because there are promising developments and for me I do think a free and open internet is probably, for me, at least, the most important cause precisely because it offers the greatest

promise to be a countervailing force against this centralized flow of information that's so necessary to keep populations propagandized. It's one of the reasons, you know, for me, the cause of the Snowden reporting, the reason Snowden was willing to go to prison for the rest of his life, wasn't it so much about the right to privacy from government surveillance, although obviously that was a big part of it. It was more, what is the internet going to be? Is the internet going to fulfill its promise of empowering and liberating ordinary people and whole populations from this kind of suffocating stranglehold that government and corporate elites have maintained largely through the flow of information. I mean, George Warwell talked a lot about this. No, Chomsky talks a lot about it,

how the much more effective form of tyranny is not when you send, you know, people and armed guards dressed in black with black face masks and drag off dissidents to prison cells. I mean, that can be terrifying, but it's so overt that it creates its own backlash and can be seen so easily. The much more subtle and therefore more effective form of tyranny is to make it seem as though you have a free society, but then control the institutions that are really deciding what information can be heard, what opinions can be expressed. And the internet was, and I think it is a great threat to that. You know, we can reach tens of thousands of people, potentially hundreds of thousands of people, more sometimes with nothing more than, you know, we don't need a newsroom

with a printing press. We don't need T-Satellites. We don't have to spend millions of dollars. The Internet permits us to be heard by a lot of people, really an unlimited number. And obviously, establishment centers of power always recognize weapons that emerge, that can be a threat to their hold on power. And they try and just... destroy them and or commandeer them. So if you're looking for kind of, you know, promising developments, I would say the independent media. And then also I think, you know, every time the West promises certain things about a war and it fails, whether in Ukraine or Iraq or Libya or Syria and now in Israel, in Gaza. And polls show this, obviously, that there is a constantly

diminishing, rapidly collapsing amount of faith and trust that the public places in these previously unquestioned institutions and all of this kind of anger and unrest and kind of sense that these institutions don't really have our own best interest in mind and don't tell us the truth. It can be misdirected into something as bad if not worse, but it can also be harnessed into something very positive. And I think all the conditions are there to do it. And the internet is the key weapon. And that's, of course, the reason why the UK, why the EU, why Canada, why Brazil and the United States are working so hard to find a means to suffocate and control it. Just one last point for me. And it is it's a point perhaps more than a question.

But my own observation is that the less debate there is, the worst the decisions that are made are. We now have a situation where, as I said, we've got ourselves into a wall in Ukraine. Ukraine, where we're having missile strikes against the nuclear country, which is making, as I said, terrifying threats, which are unsurprising, given that it is being attacked, and where we now have two superpowers coming together in opposition to us, where perhaps our best interests would have been to at least keep, if not keep them apart, at least try and maintain some civil relations with them both. the only way this could have happened

is in a situation like the one we have where free debate is restricted, where options are not being presented, where everybody is supposed to agree. So it's not just bad for democracy as an ideal. It is bad for decision-making as well. So it's not exactly a question, but anyway, it's a point that I just throw out.

Yeah, if I can just quickly add, you know, it's so interesting that if you look at every American president who has dealt with Vladimir Putin over the last 25 years, starting with Bill Clinton, going on to George Bush, then to Barack Obama, obviously it's Donald Trump. They all have said, this is somebody with whom we can work. This is a rational actor. This is a responsible actor. We have our differences, but we have a lot of common interests as well.

And there was always an attempt over all those years and those administrations, Democrat and Republican, to build bridges and work with Russia, in part to keep them away from China, but also in part because that was true. And everything changed in 2016. And that whole storyline about Russian interference and Donald Trump's collusion with the Russians and Russian control over Donald Trump, that all came from the U.S. security state. That was all manufactured by the CIA and the FBI and the NSA and Homeland Security and those other agencies inside the U.S. security state who wanted and needed Russia to be this kind of sworn enemy. I'll just share with you one last anecdote that I always found so fascinating was in 2013 when Edward Snowden landed in Moscow from Hong Kong and the Russians

couldn't let him into the country because he had no valid passport. He was trapped in that international zone in the airport for seven weeks or eight weeks. I was certain that the Americans would give the Russians enough of what they wanted. Oh, here's 10 Russian fugitives in our country that you want. Here's some agreement that you want to get Edward Snowden out of Russian hands and back into American custody, which they desperately wanted. And it never happened. And I went to Moscow in 2014 and spoke with a lot of different people in the Russian media, Russian politics. And that was all, that was my main question. Like, why didn't that happen? And one of the things they said was that it's just a very kind of Russian characteristic, a very defining and important

Russian characteristic to give refuge to Western dissidents. So Putin had handed Snowden back to the U.S. That would have been seen as kind of a bizarre violation of the Russian character. But the more important reason they said was because even though the Cold War is over, a lot of the people in the security states of both countries have this enduring animosity, this complete hatred that prevents them from doing agreements even when they want to and should. And it is so strange that Americans were indoctrinated with this all-consuming hatred of the Russians of Moscow, the Kremlin, the Soviet Union from the Cold War. And somehow, even though it went away for a little while with the fall of the Cold War, it was instantly rejuvenated. And the media began talking about

Russia completely differently than they had for 20 years before that on cue. And I do think it was a massive strategic mistake. It was this kind of reactionary impulse to allow the U.S. security state to have this enemy that they wanted and needed, but geostrategically and geopolitically, nothing is from the United States more than that. That's largely George Kennan's argument, that he couldn't understand why, after the Russians had walked away from an empire voluntarily in order to pursue the opportunity of joining up with the West, that he couldn't understand. And again, this is the main man who developed containing pulses against the Soviet Union.

He couldn't understand why there was such a hatred against the Russians. He said, you know, the communists were our adversaries or our enemies. Why are we stabbing these people in the back? And I guess my frustration, if we had a benefit of an open society is to have course correction, to find out which policies is the best. That's why I'm so worried about what you define as narrowing this debate. You know, it's Putin, Hitler or Stalin. This is where the debate is, and we can't really move forward because of this.

And I fear this is part of the reason for a strategic vacuum. Anyways, I fear we have run out of time with Glenn Greenwald. So I just want to thank you again for coming on. Yeah, I always enjoyed talking to you guys. Obviously, your knowledge is very deep. I really appreciate the work you're doing. And I'm happy to come back whenever we can make it happen. We'll be delighted to have you back.

Thank you. Yeah, same with me. Have a good afternoon.