“Dangerous” U.S. Policy & “West’s False Narrative” Stoking

Those old enough to remember when President Clinton's penis was a big news item will also remember the "Peace Dividend," that the world was going to be able to cash now that that nasty cold war was over. But guess what? Those spies didn't want to come in from the Cold, so while the planet is heating up, the political environment is dropping to sub-zero temperatures. It's deja vu all over again.

“Dangerous” U.S. Policy & “West’s False Narrative” Stoking

Postby admin » Fri Sep 02, 2022 8:37 pm

Jeffrey Sachs: “Dangerous” U.S. Policy & “West’s False Narrative” Stoking Tensions with Russia, China
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
AUGUST 30, 2022
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/8/30/ ... ia_ukraine

GUESTS
Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, sustainable development solutions advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres, and former adviser to three U.N. secretaries-general.
LINKS
Center for Sustainable Development
U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network
"The West's False Narrative About Russia and China"

We discuss Western hegemony and U.S. policy in Russia, Ukraine and China with Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, whose new article is headlined “The West’s False Narrative About Russia and China.” Sachs says the bipartisan U.S. approach to foreign policy is “unaccountably dangerous and wrongheaded,” and warns the U.S. is creating “a recipe for yet another war” in East Asia.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Politico is reporting the Biden administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve a new $1.1 billion arms sale to Taiwan. The package reportedly includes 60 anti-ship missiles, 100 air-to-air missiles. This comes after two U.S. warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait Sunday for the first time since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan earlier this month. China condemned the visit and launched major military drills near Taiwan.

Meanwhile, President Biden announced $3 billion in more military aid for Ukraine last week, including money for missiles, artillery rounds and drones to help Ukrainian forces fight Russia.

We begin today’s show looking at U.S. policy on Russia and China. We’re joined by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He’s president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He served as adviser to three U.N. secretaries-general. His latest article is headlined “The West’s False Narrative About Russia and China.”

He begins the article by writing, quote, “The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous,” Jeffrey Sachs writes.

Jeffrey Sachs, welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t you take it from there?

JEFFREY SACHS: Thank you. Good to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the story that people in the West and around the world should understand about what’s happening right now with these conflicts, with Russia, with Russia and Ukraine, and with China?

JEFFREY SACHS: The main point, Amy, is that we are not using diplomacy; we are using weaponry. This sale now announced to Taiwan that you’ve been discussing this morning is just another case in point. This does not make Taiwan safer. This does not make the world safer. It certainly doesn’t make the United States safer.

This goes back a long way. I think it’s useful to start 30 years ago. The Soviet Union ended, and some American leaders got it into their head that there was now what they called the unipolar world, that the U.S. was the sole superpower, and we could run the show. The results have been disastrous. We have had now three decades of militarization of American foreign policy. A new database that Tufts is maintaining has just shown that there have been more than 100 military interventions by the United States since 1991. It’s really unbelievable.

And I have seen, in my own experience over the last 30 years working extensively in Russia, in Central Europe, in China and in other parts of the world, how the U.S. approach is a military-first, and often a military-only, approach. We arm who we want. We call for NATO enlargement, no matter what other countries say may be harmful to their security interests. We brush aside anyone else’s security interests. And when they complain, we ship more armaments to our allies in that region. We go to war when we want, where we want, whether it was Afghanistan or Iraq or the covert war against Assad in Syria, which is even today not properly understood by the American people, or the war in Libya. And we say, “We’re peace-loving. What’s wrong with Russia and China? They are so warlike. They’re out to undermine the world.” And we end up in terrible confrontations.

The war in Ukraine — just to finish the introductory view — could have been avoided and should have been avoided through diplomacy. What President Putin of Russia was saying for years was “Do not expand NATO into the Black Sea, not to Ukraine, much less to Georgia,” which if people look on the map, straight across to the eastern edge of the Black Sea. Russia said, “This will surround us. This will jeopardize our security. Let us have diplomacy.” The United States rejected all diplomacy. I tried to contact the White House at the end of 2021 — in fact, I did contact the White House and said there will be war unless the U.S. enters diplomatic talks with President Putin over this question of NATO enlargement. I was told the U.S. will never do that. That is off the table. And it was off the table. Now we have a war that’s extraordinarily dangerous.

And we are taking exactly the same tactics in East Asia that led to the war in Ukraine. We’re organizing alliances, building up weaponry, trash-talking China, having Speaker Pelosi fly to Taiwan, when the Chinese government said, “Please, lower the temperature, lower the tensions.” We say, “No, we do what we want,” and now send more arms. This is a recipe for yet another war. And to my mind, it’s terrifying.

We are at the 60th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, which I’ve studied all my life and I’ve written about, have written a book about the aftermath. We are driving to the precipice, and we are filled with our enthusiasm as we do so. And it’s just unaccountably dangerous and wrongheaded, the whole approach of U.S. foreign policy. And it’s bipartisan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jeffrey Sachs, I wanted to ask you — one of the things that you mentioned in a recent article that was published in Consortium News was this insistence of the United States, dragging Europe along, as well, in maintaining hegemony throughout the world at a time when the economic power of the West is declining. You mention, for instance, that the BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — represent more than 40% of the world population and have a greater GDP than the G7 nations, yet their interests and their concerns are pretty much dismissed or, in the case, obviously, of Russia and China, portrayed to the American people as the aggressors, as the authoritarians, as the ones that are creating turmoil in the world.

JEFFREY SACHS: Your point is —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’m wondering if you could expand on that.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, absolutely, and directing us to that is extremely important. The disproportionate power of the Western world, and especially the Anglo-Saxon world, which started with the British Empire, and now the United States, is about 250 years old, so a short period in world history. It happened, for a lot of very interesting reasons, that the Industrial Revolution came to England first. The steam engine was invented there. That’s probably the single most important invention of modern history. Britain became militarily dominant in the 19th century, like the United States was in the second half of the 20th century. Britain ran the show. Britain had the empire on which the sun never set. And the West, meaning the United States and Western Europe, now meaning the U.S. and the European Union, the U.K., Canada, Japan — in other words, the G7, the European Union together — is a small part of the world population, perhaps now roughly 10%, a little bit more, maybe 12.5% if you add in Japan to Western Europe and the U.S. But the mindset is “We run the world.” And that was the way it was for 200 years in this Industrial Age.

But times have changed. And really, since the 1950s, the rest of the world, when it gained independence from European imperialism, started to educate its populations, started to adopt and adapt and innovate technologies. And lo and behold, a small sliver of the world really didn’t run the world or didn’t have a monopoly on wisdom or knowledge or science or technology. And this is wonderful. The knowledge and possibility of decent lives is spreading throughout the whole world.

But in the United States, there is a resentment to this, a deep resentment. I think there’s also a tremendous historical ignorance, because I think a lot of U.S. leaders have no clue as to modern history. But they resent China’s rise. That is an affront to the United States. How dare China rise! This is our world! This is our century! And so, starting around 2014, I saw, step by step — I watched it with intense detail, because it’s my daily activity — how the United States recast China not as a country that was recovering from a century and a half of great difficulty, but rather as an enemy. And we consciously, as a matter of American foreign policy, started to say, “We need to contain China. China’s rise is no longer in our interest,” as if the United States is to determine whether China is prosperous or not. The Chinese are not naive; in fact, they’re extraordinarily sophisticated. They watched all of this exactly the same way that I did. I know the authors of the U.S. texts. They are my colleagues, at Harvard or other places. I was shocked when this kind of containment idea started to be applied.

But the basic point is, the West has led the world for a brief period, 250 years, but feel, “That’s our right. This is a Western world. We are the G7. We get to determine who writes the rules of the game.” Indeed, Obama, you know, a good guy on the spectrum of what we have in foreign policy, said, “Let’s write the rules of trade for Asia, but not have China write any of those rules. The U.S. will write the rules.” This is an incredibly naive and dangerous and outmoded way to understand the world. We in the United States are 4.2% of the world’s population. We do not run the world. We are not world leader. We are a country of 4.2% of the people in a big, diverse world, and we should learn to get along, play in the sandbox peacefully, not demand that we have all the toys in the sandbox. And we’re not over that thinking yet. And unfortunately, it’s both political parties. It’s what motivates Speaker Pelosi to go to Taiwan in the middle of all of this, as if she really had to go to stir up the tensions. But it’s the mindset that the U.S. is in charge.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to go back a little bit to — back into the 1990s. You recall, I’m sure, the enormous financial collapse that occurred in Mexico in the 1990s, where the Clinton administration authorized $50 billion in a bailout to Mexico, which was really to Wall Street investors. At the time, you were advising the post-Soviet Russian government, which also had a financial — had deep financial problems at the time but was unable to get any significant Western assistance, even from the International Monetary Fund. And you were critical of that at the time. I’m wondering if you could talk about the differences how the U.S. responded to the Mexico crisis versus the Russian financial crisis, and what the roots of that may have been in what the current situation is in Russia today.

JEFFREY SACHS: Absolutely. And I had a controlled experiment, because I was economic adviser both to Poland and to the Soviet Union in the last year of President Gorbachev and to President Yeltsin in the first two years of Russian independence, 1992, ’93. My job was finance, to actually help Russia find a way to address, as you described it, a massive financial crisis. And my basic recommendation in Poland, and then in Soviet Union and in Russia, was: To avoid a societal crisis and a geopolitical crisis, the rich Western world should help to tamp down this extraordinary financial crisis that was taking place with the breakdown of the former Soviet Union.

Well, interestingly, in the case of Poland, I made a series of very specific recommendations, and they were all accepted by the U.S. government — creating a stabilization fund, canceling part of Poland’s debts, allowing many financial maneuvers to get Poland out of the difficulty. And, you know, I patted myself on the back. “Oh, look at this!” I make a recommendation, and one of them, for a billion dollars, stabilization fund, was accepted within eight hours by the White House. So, I thought, “Pretty good.”

Then came the analogous appeal on behalf of, first, Gorbachev, in the final days, and then President Yeltsin. Everything I recommended, which was on the same basis of economic dynamics, was rejected flat out by the White House. I didn’t understand it, I have to tell you, at the time. I said, “But it worked in Poland.” And they’d stare at me blankly. In fact, an acting secretary of state in 1992 said, “Professor Sachs, it doesn’t even matter whether I agree with you or not. It’s not going to happen.”

And it took me, actually, quite a while to understand the underlying geopolitics. Those were exactly the days of Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and what became the Project for the New American Century, meaning for the continuation of American hegemony. I didn’t see it at the moment, because I was thinking as an economist, how to help overcome a financial crisis. But the unipolar politics was taking shape, and it was devastating. Of course, it left Russia in a massive financial crisis that led to a lot of instability that had its own implications for years to come.

But even more than that, what these people were planning, early on, despite explicit promises to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was the expansion of NATO. And Clinton started the expansion of NATO with the three countries of Central Europe — Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic — and then George W. Bush Jr. added seven countries — Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic states — but right up against Russia. And then, in 2008, the coup de grâce, which was the U.S. insistence, over the private opposition of the European leaders — and European leaders talked to me privately about it at the time. But in 2008, Bush said NATO will expand to Ukraine and to Georgia. And again, if you take out a map and look at the Black Sea, the explicit goal was to surround Russia in the Black Sea. By the way, it’s an old playbook. It’s the same playbook as Palmerston in 1853 to 1856 in the first Crimean War: surround Russia in the Black Sea, cut off its ability to have a military presence and to project any kind of influence into the eastern Mediterranean. Brzezinski himself said in 1997 that Ukraine would be the geographic pivot for Eurasia.

So, what these neocons were doing in the early 1990s was building the U.S. unipolar world. And they were already contemplating lots of wars in order to take out the former Soviet-allied countries — wars to overthrow Saddam, wars to overthrow Assad, wars to overthrow Gaddafi. Those were all rolled out in the next 20 years. They’ve been a complete disaster, debacle for those countries, horrible for the United States, trillions of dollars wasted. But it was a plan. And that neoconservative plan is in its heyday right now on two fronts: in the Ukraine front and on the Taiwan Strait front. And it’s extraordinarily dangerous, what these people are doing to American foreign policy, which hardly is, you know, a policy of democracy. It’s a policy of a small group that has the idea that a unipolar world and U.S. hegemony is the way that we need to go.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeffrey Sachs, we don’t have much time, but since this was such a big issue — Naomi Klein took you on big time with The Shock Doctrine, talking about you recommending shock therapy. Can you draw a line between what happened as the Russian economy unraveled to the conditions leading up to the Ukraine invasion? I mean, how did the economic catastrophe that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union lead to the rise of the oligarchic class and, indeed, the presidency of Vladimir Putin?

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, I’ve tried to explain to Naomi, whom I admire a great deal, for years that what I was recommending was financial help to — whether it was Poland or to the Soviet Union or to Russia. I was absolutely aghast at the cheating and the corruption and the giveaways. And I said so very explicitly at the time and resigned over it, both because I was useless in trying to get Western help and also because I did not like at all what was going on.

And I would say that the failure of an orderly approach, which was achieved in Poland but failed in the former Soviet Union because there was no Western constructive engagement, definitely played a role in the instability in the 1990s, definitely played a role in the rise of the oligarch class. In fact, I was absolutely explaining to the U.S. and to the IMF and the World Bank in 1994, '95, what was going on. They didn't care, because they thought, “Well, that’s OK. That’s for Yeltsin, perhaps,” all of that cheating in the shares-for-loans process. Having said all of that, it was a —

AMY GOODMAN: We have less than a minute.

JEFFREY SACHS: OK. Having said all of that, I think what is important to say is that there is no linear determinism, even from events like that, which were destabilizing and very unhappy and unnecessary, to what is happening now, because when President Putin came in, he was not anti-European, he was not anti-American. What he saw, though, was the incredible arrogance of the United States, the expansion of NATO, the wars in Iraq, the covert war in Syria, the war in Libya, against the U.N. resolution. So, we created so much of what we’re facing right now through our own ineptitude and arrogance. There was no linear determination. It was step-by-step U.S. arrogance that has helped to bring us to where we are today.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeffrey Sachs, economist and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, has served as adviser to three U.N. secretaries-general. I want to thank you so much for being with us, joining us from Austria, where he’s attending a conference.

Coming up, we will look at — we will talk to a reporter who’s documented how, over the last year, the U.S. has approved just 123 Afghan humanitarian parole applications. Compare that to 68,000 approved applications from Ukrainians in recent months. Stay with us.
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Re: “Dangerous” U.S. Policy & “West’s False Narrative” Stoki

Postby admin » Fri Sep 02, 2022 8:39 pm

The West's False Narrative About Russia and China
by Prof. Jeffrey D. Sachs*
August 22, 2022

The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous. It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy.

The essential narrative of the West is built into US national security strategy. The core US idea is that China and Russia are implacable foes that are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” These countries are, according to the US, “determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”

The irony is that since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria, and Yemen just to name a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union. The US has military bases in 85 countries, China in 3, and Russia in 1 (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.

President Joe Biden has promoted this narrative, declaring that the greatest challenge of our time is the competition with the autocracies, which “seek to advance their own power, export and expand their influence around the world, and justify their repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today’s challenges.” US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of the US security establishment, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy.

The overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts. A generation earlier George W. Bush, Jr. sold the public on the idea that America’s greatest threat was Islamic fundamentalism, without mentioning that it was the CIA, with Saudi Arabia and other countries, that had created, funded, and deployed the jihadists in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere to fight America’s wars.

Or consider the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, which was painted in the Western media as an act of unprovoked perfidy. Years later, we learned that the Soviet invasion was actually preceded by a CIA operation designed to provoke the Soviet invasion! The same misinformation occurred vis-à-vis Syria. The Western press is filled with recriminations against Putin’s military assistance to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad beginning in 2015, without mentioning that the US supported the overthrow of al-Assad beginning in 2011, with the CIA funding a major operation (Timber Sycamore) to overthrow Assad years before Russia arrived.

Or more recently, when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recklessly flew to Taiwan despite China’s warnings, no G7 foreign minister criticized Pelosi’s provocation, yet the G7 ministers together harshly criticized China’s “overreaction” to Pelosi’s trip.

The Western narrative about the Ukraine war is that it is an unprovoked attack by Putin in the quest to recreate the Russian empire. Yet the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East, followed by four waves of NATO aggrandizement: in 1999, incorporating three Central European countries; in 2004, incorporating 7 more, including in the Black Sea and Baltic States; in 2008, committing to enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia; and in 2022, inviting four Asia-Pacific leaders to NATO to take aim at China.

Nor do the Western media mention the US role in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych; the failure of the Governments of France and Germany, guarantors of the Minsk II agreement, to press Ukraine to carry out its commitments; the vast US armaments sent to Ukraine during the Trump and Biden Administrations in the lead-up to war; nor the refusal of the US to negotiate with Putin over NATO enlargement to Ukraine.

Of course, NATO says that is purely defensive, so that Putin should have nothing to fear. In other words, Putin should take no notice of the CIA operations in Afghanistan and Syria; the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; the NATO overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011; the NATO occupation of Afghanistan for 15 years; nor Biden’s “gaffe” calling for Putin’s ouster (which of course was no gaffe at all); nor US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stating that the US war aim in Ukraine is the weakening of Russia.

At the core of all of this is the US attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia. It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea. The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices). In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 percent of the world compared with 41 percent in the BRICS.

There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world’s dominant power: the US. It’s past time that the US recognized the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony. With such a revised foreign policy, the US and its allies would avoid war with China and Russia, and enable the world to face its myriad environment, energy, food and social crises.

Above all, at this time of extreme danger, European leaders should pursue the true source of European security: not US hegemony, but European security arrangements that respect the legitimate security interests of all European nations, certainly including Ukraine, but also including Russia, which continues to resist NATO enlargements into the Black Sea. Europe should reflect on the fact that the non-enlargement of NATO and the implementation of the Minsk II agreements would have averted this awful war in Ukraine. At this stage, it is diplomacy, not military escalation, is the true path to European and global security.

………………………

*Professor at Columbia University, is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as adviser to three UN Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres.
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Re: “Dangerous” U.S. Policy & “West’s False Narrative” Stoki

Postby admin » Thu Nov 03, 2022 12:48 am

How to End the War in Ukraine: Matt Duss and Ray McGovern Debate U.S. Policy on Russia, NATO & More
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow.org
NOVEMBER 02, 2022
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/11/2/ ... transcript

GUESTS
Matt Duss, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders.
Ray McGovern, former senior CIA analyst and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

LINKS
Matt Duss on Twitter
Ray McGovern on Twitter

As the U.S. pours billions in military aid into Ukraine, we host a debate on the Biden administration’s response to the war and U.S. policy toward Russia amid increasing calls among progressives for a diplomatic end to the conflict. We speak to former Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who specialized in the Soviet Union. “Everyone understands that at some point there will need to be a negotiation to bring this war to a close, but I think the tension within the progressive community comes to when and how that diplomacy actually takes place,” says Duss. McGovern stresses that U.S. policymakers must understand Russia’s motivations, saying Russia sees the eastward expansion of NATO as threatening its core interests akin to how the United States viewed the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s. “We need to go back and figure out how this all started in order to figure out how to end it,” says McGovern.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. When we come back, as the Biden administration vows more military aid for Ukraine we host a debate on the U.S. response to the war and U.S. policy toward Russia. We will speak with Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst who specialized in the Soviet Union, as well as former Bernie Sanders advisor Matt Duss, a Ukrainian-American who is now a Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International peace. Stay with us.

[MUSIC BREAK]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, joined by Democracy Now! co-host Juan González in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Hi, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Hi, Amy, and welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at the war in Ukraine. Russia has announced it is rejoining a deal allowing for grain shipments from Ukraine’s ports. This comes just four days after Russia withdrew from the deal, sparking fears it could worsen the global hunger crisis. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the renewed deal would prioritize grain shipments to Somalia, Djibouti, Sudan and other African nations. Russia said it rejoined the deal after Ukraine agreed not to use the sea corridor to attack Russian forces.

Meanwhile, The New York Times is reporting senior Russian military leaders have had high-level discussions about how tactical weapons could be used in the war in Ukraine. That’s tactical nuclear weapons. The article was based on unnamed U.S. officials who said they have seen no evidence that the Russians were moving nuclear weapons into place or making preparations for a nuclear strike. Last month, President Biden described the war in Ukraine as the first time the world has seen a direct threat of the use of a nuclear weapon since the Cuban Missile Crisis 60 years ago. In a speech to Democratic donors, Biden said, “We’re trying to figure out, what is Putin’s off-ramp?”

Well, today we host a debate on the U.S. response to Russia’s invasion and U.S. policy toward Russia. We are joined by two guests. In Washington, D.C., we are joined by Matt Duss. He is former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, a Ukrainian-American who is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And in Raleigh, North Carolina, we are joined by Ray McGovern, former senior CIA analyst. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet foreign policy branch and daily briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. At the time it was George H.W. Bush. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Ray McGovern, let’s begin with you. Why don’t you lay out what you think the U.S. policy should be toward Russia now and in dealing with the Ukraine war.

RAY MCGOVERN: Amy, I think we need to go back and figure out how this all started in order to figure out how to end it. In a word, you quoted a new New York Times story this morning about Russian tactical nuclear missiles and senior Russian military officials discussing this. The source described by The New York Times was “multiple U.S. officials.” Now, I dare say that the same “multiple U.S. officials” and some of the same authors of this piece warned us seven times at the end of July in one article that there were sure to be weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I guess we have to say that The New York Times has lost its credibility on these issues, but more so since they back off the story themselves, saying Putin himself last week said, “There’s no need for us to use tactical nuclear missiles and we never threatened to do so.” And Putin happens to be right on that.

The last thing I will say here is that the notion that the Russians are desperate is erroneous. It is contrived. The Russians aren’t losing. The Russians are not going to lose because they can’t afford to. When I say this, I mean that Putin sees an existential threat from not only Ukraine becoming part of NATO, but NATO using the emplacements for so-called anti-ballistic missiles in Romania and Poland already there to put in cruise missiles or to put in hypersonic missiles which Putin himself warned last December would give him between seven and ten minutes, or if hypersonic missiles, five minutes, to decide, in a word, whether to blow up the rest of the world.


Now, Katrina vanden Heuvel said in an op-ed just last week that we have to empathize with anyone, even the hated Putin, even the hated Russians. And just thinking this through, and I will close with this, thinking about how many Americans hate Russia. I mean, hate is the word. And I think back to South Pacific—you have got to be carefully taught.

[singing] You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, you’ve got to be taught from year to year, it’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear, you’ve got to be carefully taught. You’ve got to be taught, the Russians to hate, in order to remain part of the Fourth Estate. You’ve got to—[end singing]


I made up the last two lines, okay? But that’s what it is! In a word, we’ve had six years of unfounded hating Russians. I mentioned Russiagate. I think the press, the Fourth Estate, could do a real service by saying, “Hey, we were wrong about that! The Russians didn’t hack into the DNC and they didn’t do all those other dastardly things that they were accused of. And let those 35 Russian diplomats come on back and let’s talk to each other. Let’s work this out. There is no reason why we can’t make a deal.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I would like to bring in Matt Duss on this issue. Matt, as a foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders famously, an advocate for peace not war, what is your perspective on how this war can end, and also the issue of how it began?

MATT DUSS: Thank you for having me, first of all. I would say the easiest way for this war to end would be for Vladimir Putin to end his invasion and withdraw Russian troops from Ukrainian territory. As far as how this war began, there certainly are a lot of things we could bring in to describe the deteriorating U.S.-Russia relationship over the past decades and longer, but just to focus on this issue of NATO which was brought up just earlier, certainly Vladimir Putin has brought up the concern about NATO. This is not something just he has brought up. Other Russian officials have brought it up in the past.

I think it is fair to say that some of the steps that were taken with regard to NATO could have been done differently, but this idea that Vladimir Putin had to wage this war because he sees an existential threat from NATO I think has just been completely discredited by events. Let’s remember, Finland and Sweden announced their decision to join NATO some months ago. Finland shares an 800-mile border with Russia. The response from the Russian government was basically, “No big deal.” I would suggest that if NATO was really contributing to the sense of existential threat here, we might have seen a bit of a different response to Finland joining NATO.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I would like to ask you, Matt, in terms of that, though, clearly, there is a far different relationship between Ukraine and Russia than there is between Finland and Russia. Clearly, Russia historically sees Ukraine as the entry point to previous invasions and attack on its country whether it is Napoleon in the 19th century or Hitler and the Nazis in the 20th century. Your sense of Putin’s view of the special relationship that has existed between Ukraine and Russia?

MATT DUSS: I think that is very fair to bring up. Clearly, there is a very different historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine, and Putin himself has described his view of that relationship which is that Ukrainians don’t really exist; they are simply Russians. Certainly, Ukrainians disagree with that, and I think most of the people in the world would disagree with that. Ukraine is a different country. Ukraine has a different culture, a different history. Certainly there is a historical relationship with Russia, but I think this also gets to what one of Putin’s real goals here is, and that is not just to defend himself against the alleged threat from NATO encroachment but it is to erase the Ukrainians as an independent political entity.

I think we see various steps that he is taking to make that vision real, including the kidnapping, essentially, of thousands of Ukrainian children, transporting them into Russia, putting them with new families, a violation, a gross violation of international humanitarian law with regard to occupied territories. So I think Putin himself has given us I think a much better understanding of his real goals and grievances in launching this war.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to General Mike Mullen. In October, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff appeared on ABC This Week calling for talks to end the war.

MIKE MULLEN: It also speaks to the need, I think, to get to the table. I am a little concerned about the language, which we are about at the top, if you will.

NEWS ANCHOR: President Biden’s language.

MIKE MULLEN: President Biden’s language. We’re about at the top of the language scale, if you will, and I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing.


AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get both of your responses on this, beginning with Matt Duss. You are the former foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders. Clearly, there is a major debate going on right now within the progressive community of elected officials in Congress. You had this letter that was released and withdrawn within a day that called for continued military support for Ukraine but at the same time pushing for negotiations as we have seen Germany call for and France call for. That was released but withdrawn by Pramila Jayapal, the head of the Congressional progressive Caucus. We interviewed Congressmember Ro Khanna; he said it shouldn’t have been withdrawn, it should be the position.

If you can explain why they would have withdrawn this? And you have Bernie Sanders himself—he’s not a congressman so he wouldn’t have signed on to the letter; he’s a senator—but he did say that he supported the withdrawal of the letter. He said the Russian invasion of Ukraine has to be resisted, that the letter should have been withdrawn. He said, “I don’t agree with that.” They don’t agree with it, apparently, around the issue of urging President Biden to negotiate an end to the war with Vladimir Putin.
Explain what this battle is about. Then I would like to get Ray McGovern’s response as well.

MATT DUSS: Sure. A couple things about the letter. One is I think in general terms, it is right to support diplomacy. As I said in a recent interview with The New Yorker, the United States is bringing its superior military and intelligence capabilities to bear on Ukraine’s behalf, I think appropriately. It is also appropriate for the United States to bring its superior diplomatic capabilities to bear on Ukraine’s behalf.

But I think the question here is when the time is right for that high-level diplomacy. No one wants to see the United States—or I would say I don’t want to see and certainly many Americans and Ukrainians don’t what to see the United States simply negotiating the end to this war with Russia over the heads of the Ukrainians. It is their country that has been invaded. They are the ones who are fighting and dying to defend their country. So I think we want to avoid the impression this this is simply two great powers divvying up the spoils.

I think that is part of the concern that you saw from even some of the signers of the letter which I would just remind folks was actually written in I believe June and July and signed in June and July and then released with little warning to some of the signers. I don’t want to get too into the details of that but I would agree that diplomacy is good. I think everyone understands that at some point there will need to be a negotiation to bring this war to a close, but I think the tension within the progressive community comes to when and how that diplomacy actually takes place.

AMY GOODMAN: Ray McGovern?

RAY MCGOVERN: Amy, I was distraught. It was scandalous that within 36 hours those “progressive” Democrats tucked tail and gave up. I mean, the suggestion was eminently sensible. Who could be against talks? There is an opportunity coming up where presidents are to meet in Bali, Indonesia. There would be an opportunity. Rose Gottemoeller, who used to be Obama’s czar in the State Department for arms control has suggested we start with these intermediate-range nuclear missiles and start to deal on a tactical level.

But the notion that we shouldn’t talk is—you know, I have just been focusing on the Cuban Missile Crisis of exactly 60 years ago. How did that get resolved? By talks. And by a modicum of trust. Let me explain. Kennedy took a very, very serious position, didn’t he? He said, “Look, here is a quarantine.” He called it a quarantine; it was really a blockade, illegal. “Here’s my invasion force in Key West and here I am going to threaten nuclear weapons.” That is what he did. Khrushchev talked to him and said, “Well, look, okay [laugh] we’re going to back off but we need something.” And Kennedy said, “Okay, I promise not to invade Cuba.” Khrushchev said, “Okay.” And on the side, they did this little deal on Turkey. Now, that was because—these were oral promises. These were negotiations. By teletype in those days! But why we can’t have that kind of thing now with people saying “You’re giving in to the Russians” is beyond me.

With respect to the Finnish, let me say a word about that. Matt only quoted the first part of Russia’s response to the Finnish application to join NATO. What Putin said is, “Look, we’ve lived with the Finns for a lot of years. As long as no NATO infrastructure goes into Finland, we’ve got no problem.” What does that mean? NATO infrastructure are these little holes in the ground that can accommodate missiles like the Tomahawk and hypersonic missiles which can reach Moscow in five, six, seven minutes. That is what they are afraid of, and that is what they consider to be their existential threat.

Just a final word here comparing the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Ukraine crisis. Now, does anyone say to John Kennedy, “Look, Mr. President, you’re overreacting. This is unprovoked, all of these measures you are taking, some of them illegal! Blockade or—that’s unprovoked!” Did anybody say that? No. Why? Because it was provoked. Now putting missiles within five minutes, six minutes of Moscow or the ICBM force in the western part of Russia, that’s provocation, folks. And Putin has been warning about that for seven, eight, nine years.

John Mearsheimer, the dean of the realistic school of political science, said eight years ago that the crisis in Ukraine is the West’s fault. He used good evidence for that. There’s lots more evidence now. He was right then and he is right now. So what does that mean? That means we have to deal. We have to deal with the fact that Putin is in the same position that John Kennedy was 60 years ago. He sees an existential threat. He’s not going to back off. He’s going to do illegal things. Unless we understand that and unless our administration gets used to the fact that—I was a military intelligence officer, okay? If you look at the map, for god’s sake, where is the enemy? What’s the terrain? What’s the weather? What’s the weather going to be in the next couple of months? And most of all, what we call LOCS; not bagels and lox, but lines of communication and supply.

I mean, Russia can’t lose this either militarily or politically. It is going to keep going as far as it has to.
If HIMARS and the like comes in, he’s going have to go farther north and west. As Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister has said, it’s is a matter of geography. “We would settle for the Donbas in southern Ukraine. If you’re going to put in HIMARS or worse, geography will dictate that we go farther.” So talks, of course talks are necessary! And, talks are really—”labil” is the German word—they are very delicate because there’s very little trust. There has to be a modicum of trust as there was in 1962 on the Cuban Missile Crisis.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I would like to ask Matt and possibly Ray also to respond to—Europe is suffering much more as a result of their continuation of this war, both in terms of its having to redirect its energy sources, much higher inflation than exists here in the United States right now, and there are some who view that Europe was dragged into this more by the United States in terms of the way it approached Russia and Putin in terms of Ukraine. Your response to that and to whether there are differences between how Europe sees this war and the United States?

MATT DUSS: I think there initially were. We saw the reports that European leaders were actually quite skeptical, as publicly were Ukrainian leaders, of the prospect of a Russian invasion. The United States continued to say that the intelligence showed that Russia was preparing for an invasion, that the pieces were being moved into place for this invasion. And they turned out to be right.

Mr. McGovern earlier brought up the Iraq War WMDs debacle. I think certainly the Biden administration is quite aware of that record and I think they have been very, very careful in the importance of rebuilding U.S. credibility when it comes to making these kinds of claims. I think to their credit, the claims, the intelligence that they have made public all along the way has been affirmed repeatedly.

Now, with regard to the European position, I think there were a lot of European countries, particularly Germany, that had a vision of much cooperation with Vladimir Putin certainly on the issue of energy. But I think European leaders, based on observing Putin’s own behavior, have come around to the U.S. view of the threat that Putin poses and what the problem, what this invasion of Ukraine could really mean not just for Europe but for the world. Certainly, they are the ones who are facing much more immediate difficulty with regard to energy and food insecurity. The Global South, as Amy mentioned early on, with regard to the agreement over grain exports, this is a really good deal that is happening because certainly countries in the Global South are bearing the brunt of this global food crisis as well.

But just one last point here. Mr. McGovern brought up John Mearsheimer’s comment about this war being the U.S.'s fault. I know John Mearsheimer. He is not, however, the Pope. He has a view. I think there are many eminent scholars who know Russia much better than John Mearsheimer does who have a very different view of how we got here. Again, I think those views should be taken into account and I would point people once again to what Vladimir Putin himself has said is the reason for this invasion repeatedly, both in the written word and in speeches, and that in part is to reestablish what he believes to be Russia's historical rights, Russia’s historical control of what he believes to be a kind of Russian imperium.

That is not to say that diplomacy isn’t necessary. Diplomacy is necessary. I believe there is diplomacy ongoing right now, perhaps not at the high level that some would like to see, but we know that U.S. Defense Secretary Austin, has a line open with Russian Defense Minister Shoigu. They have talked multiple times. There are also contacts and talks going on at lower levels. I think these are the kinds of things that could lead to greater talks at higher levels at some time down in the future. But I think the disagreement is when does that time come, when is it most appropriate.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ray McGovern, if you could respond? Also, this issue of Europe and energy and Russia, the blowing up of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which the Western press is remarkably uninterested in trying to investigate what actually happened there and these ludicrous claims, in my view, that Russia would blow up its own $10 billion project of supplying energy to Europe.

RAY MCGOVERN: There you go, Juan. Most Americans would be prepared to believe that, and I would submit that that is a direct result of six years worth of brainwashing. Now, with respect to what Putin has said, Matt is free to quote Putin but not erroneously. Putin spelled out very precisely what the aims of that invasion was. He said it was a demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. There was no indication that he sent enough troops in there to take over Kiev. As a matter of fact, they have been very reluctant to shell the cities until now, until many provocations have happened.

So you have to kind of really not do what I call a Giuliani theorem. You recall what he said to that Arizona legislator about corruption in the election. He’s on the phone and he says, “There’s lots of corruption. You’ve got to look at it, because it is corrupt!” And the legislator said, “Well oh my god, sure, we’ll look at it. What is the evidence?” And Giuliani famously said, “Well, we have lots of theories; no evidence.” I would suggest to Matt that he has got a nice theory there that Putin wants to take over Ukraine and that Putin wants to take over maybe the rest of Europe like other people say. There is no evidence for that.


Now with respect to the West Germans, the West Europeans and particularly the Germans, I know the Germans real well. I spent five years there. Some of them are my best friends, all right? [laugh] But they are _so _ subservient to the United States, 77 years after the war, that it is hard for me to believe they won’t stand up on their own two feet. When? And it’s very clear to me when the U.S. or its allies, U.K., blow up [laugh] Nord Stream 1 and 2—I mean, hello!

So, German industry is going to go ptoom! The German people are going to go ploof! Okay? This winter. And German people, will they ever act any different than they did in 1933 and stand up on their own two legs and say, “No, we’re not going to abide by that”? The Germans had the majority in 1933. There are a majority of German citizens who feel straightaway that this is [laugh] unnecessary. And I daresay they may follow the Czechs and many of the others who by the tens of thousands are already in the streets. I just hope that they see their way to standing on their own two feet and saying, “Look, we put up with a lot of stuff, and when you blew up those pipelines, we’re going to freeze. And also our industry is going kaput, so would you lay off? We’re going to stand on our own two feet. We’re going to make a deal with the Russians.”

Now there are reports that the Germans were already talking with the Russians about a deal on energy, on gas supplies, when those pipelines were sabotaged. So it is a real sad story in Europe and it is going to be sadder as the months go by. Not only that, but as the ice covers those fields in Ukraine, Russian forces are going to go forward. And there is a hint in Putin’s latest speech that Odesa could be negotiated about. People ought to look at that. People ought to read his speeches. People ought to read through the Q&A. Now if Odesa can easily fall—after all, it is a Russian city—if it can fall to the Russians, well, maybe they will be able to negotiate on that and say, “Look, we will make a deal here. Let’s talk and let’s work out something where we stop and Ukraine persists in a smaller way but the war is over and Ukrainians stop dying by the thousands.”

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s get Matt Duss’s response to that and also Juan’s question about Nord Stream. Newsweek reported that speaking to reporters on February 7th, Biden said, “If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again. There will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it,” the president said. A journalist asked Biden how he could do that since Germany was in control of the project. The president replied, “I promise you, we will be able to do it.” If you could talk about both Nord Stream and the rest of what Ray McGovern just said?

MATT DUSS: Sure. Just to address Nord Stream. first I think what the president clearly meant there was that Nord Stream 2 would not be brought online. The project would be halted. I don’t think that was a threat, despite the tendency of some to try and interpret it as a threat, that the United States would blow up Nord Stream 2. There is no evidence that the United States was responsible for that.

As for some of these other claims about what Putin really wants, I feel like we are getting into just bizarre territory here. To claim that Putin wasn’t trying to take over Kyiv—listen, the Russians landed strike teams outside Kyiv with the goal of toppling the Ukrainian government. These troops were not just there to go camping, OK? The plan clearly was to land forces inside Kyiv, to take control of the government. Clearly, Russia miscalculated. They did not send enough troops. They did not have solid enough supply lines to support these troops. But then to turn around and point to Russia’s poor planning as somehow evidence that Putin’s goals were much more modest, I think is just untenable.

I did not claim that Putin wants to take over all of Europe. I pointed out that Putin himself claimed that he wanted to reestablish what he describes as Russia’s historic right. I don’t want to overstate that but I do again want to point people to things that Putin has written and said about this which give a good idea of his own goals.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both very much for joining us. There is a lot there. We want to thank Matt Duss, Ukrainian American, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders, and Ray McGovern, former senior CIA analyst, speaking to us from Raleigh, North Carolina. Matt is from Washington, D.C.
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