WBD474 Audio Transcription

The Background to the Russia-Ukraine War with Scott Horton

Interview date: Saturday 12th March

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Scott Horton. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Scott Horton is an anti-war radio host, podcaster, and author. In this interview, we discuss whether there are any just wars, the Ukraine/Russia conflict, and how a chain reaction of misunderstood events going back to WW1 got us here.

“You hear this all the time: well, how come Ukraine doesn’t have the right to join whatever military alliance they want? You hear that every day, all day, well, just think about that. Is that really true? Is anyone thinking for a minute that Canada and Mexico have the right to join into a military alliance with Russia and China? Or is that absolutely preposterous?”

— Scott Horton

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Hi there.  Just to give a bit of context with regards to today's show, it features Scott Horton from the Libertarian Institute and antiwar.com.  Scott's been on the show before, and with us being out here, we wanted to get him back on, originally to discuss ideas regarding libertarianism, liberty and Bitcoin.  But with everything that's been happening out in Ukraine and Russia and this subject keeps coming up on the show, with Russia being cancelled and Ukraine having funding via Bitcoin, I felt like it was an opportunity to ask some questions to Scott regarding the background to the war, and other ideas or questions with regards to war, just with Scott covering this subject quite a lot.

So, if you are only interested in Bitcoin and you don't care about what's going on in the region, then you might want to skip this.  That said, I know there is a lot of interest in what's happening out there.  So, just to give you that context that this does not feature Bitcoin.  If you do have any questions with regards to this show, you can reach out to me; or, you can just go to Scott's website, or go and check out the Libertarian Institute, or antiwar.com, and also check out the show notes, there's going to be a bunch of information there.  If you want to reach out to me, if you've got any questions with regards to this show, you can ping me an email, it's hello@whatbitcoindid.com. 

Outside of that, it's quite a dense episode, there's a lot we cover here.  So, yeah, I can't really say, "I hope you enjoy it", because it's not the coolest subject in the world, but it was really good to sit down with Scott and get into the background with this.  Okay, I will speak to you all or see you all soon.

Scott, hi, good to see you in person and meet you finally.

Scott Horton: Absolutely, thank you for having me.

Peter McCormack: I'm a big fan of your work.  I can't remember if you remember the last interview, but I discovered you, I was driving from New York to Pennsylvania, or somewhere, and I was listening to back-to-back episodes of Tom Woods, and you did a whole season about war.  Being an anti-war person, it was a real eye-opener for me.  We knew we were coming into town and I knew I wanted to talk to you again, but I reached out to you before what's happened recently in Ukraine and Russia, and I'm somebody who sometimes can shoot from the hip quite quickly and come to a set of opinions without knowing the full facts.  And just being someone who's anti-war just was very much like, "Fuck Putin, this is terrible, this country's being invaded", which I know you agree with. 

But I watched your video last night, and there was this whole background to what happened with NATO and the agreements in Europe that I wasn't fully aware of.  So originally, I wanted to talk to you about liberty, but I think it would be much more useful, where we are now, to talk about this, because you know a lot more about this than I do, and probably a lot of people, so you feel okay with that?

Scott Horton: Absolutely.  For the record, I am good on everything, but yes, this is my comparative advantage, the wars and American foreign policy for sure.

Peter McCormack: Well, we'll be back in Austin another time in the future and we can talk about liberty, but it's a pressing issue right now.  But I do have an interesting question to start with, and I suspect you've been asked this before, but I've not heard you've been asked this; but as an anti-war person, has there been ever for you a just war, wars that are justified, because for me, the history of World War II always felt like that was certainly a just defence from the Allies.  But I always felt like the Balkans was a just war, but I've heard since then, I think it was from Dave Smith, said, "Absolutely not".  But I thought it would be an interesting question, just as a starting place with you.

Scott Horton: Well, I mean obviously it's complicated.  World War II especially is a very complicated one.  Overall, if I have to go back to American history, I like the result of the American Revolution and the succession from the British Empire.

Peter McCormack: Oh, so that's the only one?  Thank you!

Scott Horton: But I cannot stand by the war against Mexico, or the Civil War, or the war against Spain, or the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, or any of the Middle East Wars, or really the Cold War overall.  In fact, if you go to my website, there's a thing at the bottom where you can click and get this free e-book.  It's this nice thing a friend, Christopher Lynn, did for me, that's just summing up how they lied us into every single war.  So, if they're just wars, how come they have to lie us into every single one of them.

Even World War II.  I mean, I don't think we want to spend too much time on it, but my rote answer for World War II is, "It's all Woodrow Wilson's fault for getting us into World War I".  That war was a stalemate, essentially frozen; everybody lost.  Wilson's slogan for getting us into that war was, "We wanted peace without victory", in other words, we weren't going to be conquerors and take over Europe, we were just going to win and then make everybody be nice after that.  But that was where they already were, "Peace without victory", because everybody was out of shoes and ammo, and it was just over.  Even at the time, after America intervened and tilted the balance against the Germans and they had to surrender, they were still on French soil when they surrendered, but they were in no position to march on Paris anyway.  Everybody was just frozen in the mud.

So then, here come the Americans and the first thing they do is, they bribe Kerensky, the new revolutionary government in Russia, to stay in the war; his trucks and oil and boots and ammo to stay in the war.  That led to Kerensky being overthrown by Lenin and Trotsky about six months after he had taken power, and the birth of the USSR and the Soviet Union. 

Then of course, as everybody learns in school, even in government school I learned, that because America had helped Britain and France win such a lopsided victory against the Germans when they entered, that put them in a position to dictate the Versailles Treaty to Germany, which made them pay the reparations for the entire costs of the war on all sides, and stripped them of all their outlying properties.  And I don't just mean their territories in Africa, or something, but all of their own outlying properties.  And, as even your 7th-grade schoolteacher should have taught you, this humiliation was what laid the fertile soil for the rise of the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler in the name of getting revenge for that.

Then, at the same time, they also destroyed the Ottoman Empire, and helped the British and the French expand the British Empire.  I mean, the French got Lebanon and Syria, but the British got a million square miles, the rest of the Middle East.  So, this all set the stage for World War II and then the Cold War, the regime change, the communist victory in China, which was somewhat dependent on the previous victory in Russia for the Communists, then the American entire empire and Cold War, in the name of containing that Soviet menace, that they'd helped to save from the Germans, who were the result of their previous negative policy.

So in other words, even if you want to start history after Pearl Harbour and Hitler declares war on America, and don't we have to go whoop them now, Robert Higgs calls that, "Truncating the antecedents"; never mind how America baited the Japanese into attacking us, so that they could have an excuse to go to war in Europe and all of these things; but even if you truncate the antecedents, then you still have to recognise that the situation in Europe between Hitler and Stalin, that could never been, except they were both Woodrow Wilson's bastard sons.

Peter McCormack: But even so, I understand that, I understand exactly what you're saying, and I did actually learn a lot about this when I read the book, When Money Dies, about the Weimar Republic, I wasn't aware of the reparations after World War I.  Also, they had to get rid of their army, they weren't allowed to have an army as well.

Scott Horton: Yeah, they were completely humiliated.

Peter McCormack: But at the point where World War II is happening, even if you ignore, say, from the American side, because you blame Woodrow Wilson, would you say there was a justification for Churchill to bring the British into that war?

Scott Horton: It's a good one.  I have to say first of all, this is not my speciality.

Peter McCormack: Okay, that's fine.

Scott Horton: But I do have an opinion.  In fact, I was just talking with a friend yesterday.  This is a book I always wanted to read, but never got around to.  But a friend was telling me about this just yesterday.  It's Human Smoke, which essentially just shows how, as my friend put it to me, "There were just 100 off-ramps to war".  There were so many alternatives to war, and yet they just stayed on this path in essentially the stupidest way.

We're raised to look at all this as so inevitable, and look at the leaders on the other side, Adolf Hitler and Hirohito and Tojo, these are not sympathetic characters, these are comic book villains, and they truly are.  I mean, Hitler was probably the most fanatic person who ever lived on any issue, and that includes baseball or anything.  I mean, this guy was out of his mind for power, the way that he was.

So, all that being said, how did they deal with him?  And if you look at the book that I did read about this, the best book on this that I read, Buchanan's book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.  Well, that quote, "The Unnecessary War", that's what Churchill called it after it was over.  He said, "Guess we really shouldn't have done that".  And what he's talking about is how essentially, the mythology is very clear.  Neville Chamberlain went and made a deal with Hitler, where Hitler promised to stay out of Czechoslovakia.  And Neville Chamberlain, that ridiculous, gullible cissy said, "Look at me, I created peace in our time.  I have Adolf Hitler's name on a piece of paper, it's great".  Then, Hitler went into Czechoslovakia anyway.   

So now, the lesson of history is supposed to be that Britain should have just invaded then, I guess, instead of just making a deal at Munich at that point.  Or, once he invaded Czechoslovakia, they should have went to war then.  Maybe they should have gone to war as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933 and done a regime change then, something like that.  But what actually happened was, once Hitler did go into Czechoslovakia, Neville Chamberlain, of course, the man, the individual human man was humiliated. 

So, what did he do?  In a fit of nervous breakdown and boohooing for his own public image as Prime Minister, he went and handed a war guarantee to the Polish colonels, who were not much different than the Nazis themselves.  And he told the Polish colonels, "Do not negotiate with Hitler for the corridor to Danzig", which was a German city.  It had only been turned over to the Poles, again, in the Versailles Treaty, where it had been stripped away from Germany and handed to the Poles.

So, Hitler was not saying, "I want to take all of Poland", he was saying, "I want a corridor to Danzig" which, you know what, again we're talking about Adolf Hitler here, I'm not saying he was anything other than who he was; what I'm saying is, how do you deal with him in a situation like that?  Well, Neville Chamberlain's brilliant idea was, "I'll tell the Poles to tell him to go screw himself, and that I'll have their back if they do", and then that's exactly what the Poles did.  And yet, did the British have any ability whatsoever to field an army into Poland to force the Germans back out again?  No.  They didn't have that at all.  In fact, even after the war, Poland ended up enslaved under Soviet Communism until the year 1989.  That was how it actually played out.  Britain didn't save Poland.

I read this ten years ago or something, but if I remember right, when Chamberlain did this, his own Foreign Minister, Lord Alfred Gray, screamed in his face and called him the stupidest idiot in the world and said he should be locked in an insane asylum.  How could you give a war guarantee to the Polish colonels and let them decide whether we get into a war with Germany or not; are you crazy?

Then, when he invaded Poland, made a deal with Stalin and carved the thing up, and then Churchill took over, all that happened was, essentially Britain and France invented a policy that made sure that Hitler would turn west first.  And instead of invading the Soviet Communists, who were his actual menace in the world anyway; instead, the Brits would make sure that he would destroy France and Belgium and Denmark and bomb the hell out of Great Britain for two years before turning east and fighting Stalin in a war that now, he lost, because he wasn't able to beat him.

Now, Pat is not saying in that book, by the way, that we should have just let Hitler fight Stalin.  What he's saying is, if Churchill hadn't given that war guarantee to Poland, then the Poles probably would have been in a position to just negotiate the corridor, there wouldn't have been a war at all.  Hitler and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, where Hitler and Stalin made their truce at the start of the war to divide Poland, that would have never happened.

People say, "You didn't want to go rescue the Jews in the Holocaust?" well, the Jews died in the Holocaust.  What Pat's saying is, "No war, no Holocaust".  No war guarantee to Poland, no war.  So, just like we're about to talk about with Vladimir Putin, you don't have to be on this guy's team to say, "How do you handle a situation like this?"  You have essentially a raving madman strung out on methamphetamines in charge of the most powerful military state that's ever existed, it's in the heart of Europe, his demands are actually pretty reasonable; maybe they should have continued to appease him one more move, "Go ahead and take Danzig back".  It's a German city anyway.

But instead, Neville Chamberlain threw a hissy fit, according to his own men.  He blundered Britain into that war and blundered the entire west of Europe, all of western democracies into essentially -- made this situation where Hitler was "forced to choose", to smash them all first before turning against the Soviets.  And by the way, even if he'd gone straight to war with the Soviets first, like let's say he took Danzig, but now he's too close for Stalin's blood and they end up getting in a tangle anyway, well now the Jews have western Europe to escape to.  Except that no, in our timeline they didn't, they had nowhere to escape to.

So, the problem here is for all of us, we learn about World War II when we're little kids, and we learn about it's all black and white footage from when our grandparents were little.  My dad was born in 1942.  This is ancient history to us, so baked into that is the inevitability of all the different choices that were made.  I also just alluded to the fact that FDR had tried repeatedly to bait Germany into making the same mistake they had made in World War I; sink an American ship so that we can go to war in Europe.  He wanted to go in and enter the war on Britain and the Soviet Union's side, and Hitler wouldn't take the bait. 

So instead, they deliberately finagled the plan to provoke Japan into firing the first shot, as the Secretary of Defense, Stimson, wrote in his diary, "And they deliberately set about an eight-point plan to provoke Japan into attacking us first", which worked, which they implemented in order.  The McCollum memo, you can read it online, which succeeded in baiting the Japanese into making the mistake of attacking us at Pearl Harbour. 

Then, Hitler then made the mistake of declaring war on the United States, and I believe his calculation was that if he fulfilled his part of the alliance to Japan, which he's seriously putting himself in jeopardy by doing that, right; he knew what happened last time America entered on Britain's and France's side, and what an industrial power we were over here.  But he was gambling that if he would declare war on us, then Japan would declare war on Russia, the Soviet Union.  Then the Soviets would have to divide their forces to fight the Japanese in the east, and that would give Hitler an advantage on his eastern front and Russia's west, which didn't happen.  So, he just got himself bombed, and that was it.

So anyway, the short answer to your question is, it's a lot more of a complicated mess than the obvious thing.  If the question comes down to, "Was Hitler a real, real bad guy?" then the answer is, "Yeah".  But you have to ask yourself, why would anybody have put him in that position of power in the first place?  Then, the answer was, "Well, he's better than the Commies".  "Well, what Commies?"  "The Commies who only existed in power in the Soviet Union, or anywhere in eastern Europe, because of America's intervention in World War I.  Also, at least he hates the British and the French for us, and is determined to get back our lost provinces and restore our lost dignity".

In fact, there's this excellent book, called Wilson's War, by Jim Powell, How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Stalin and World War II, a great book.  What the hell was I going to quote out of there?  There's so many good things in there!  Oh, I know what it was, I'm sorry, it was on the humiliation.  It was that Hitler began every speech denouncing, what he called, "The traitors of 1918", and those were the men who had signed the Treaty.

Oh, you'll love this.  Woodrow Wilson, he's so high-minded with his democratic ideals, you understand, he insists that the German militarists, the right wing, essentially, who had waged the war, well like Dick Cheney, you don't negotiate with evil.  So, he wouldn't let them sign the surrender.  He made the German Democrats, who didn't do it, sign the surrender.  So then, Hitler got to say, "The traitors of 1918", against the Jewish Democrats who had signed the Treaty, when it was the German military who had given up and told the civilians, "The game is up, sign the Treaty". 

It wasn't their fault; it was the military, who were essentially unable to win the war at that point, and quite before they got Berlin occupied at that point.  And it was Woodrow Wilson's fault that he refused to let the actual guys in charge of the war, say the generals or the top civilians in the government, take responsibility; and he made the opposition, essentially the Liberals, take the responsibility for it.  Hitler rose to power on their ashes. 

"The stab in the back, the traitors, the people who gave in to the evil enemy and let them get away with everything against us", etc; that's what he's saying at the podium.  You see the famous footage of him ranting and ranting at the podium, that's what he's saying.  He's saying, "I will get you your dignity back", and people said, "Well, he sure does seem determined"!  That was the deal.

Peter McCormack: So, you're essentially talking about an escalation based on poor decision-making, or mistakes, something we could easily start considering with what's happening right now in eastern Europe.  But we also can't guarantee, even if he had made the right decision, a larger war wouldn't have broken out in Europe.  There's no guarantee.  I mean, Hitler could have wanted to exert power elsewhere.  We can recognise the mistakes, but assume, or hope that it wouldn't have got to that, but we can't guarantee it, right?

Scott Horton: Well, there's a strong argument too that if they had succeeded, if they hadn't had to turn west first, and their first war had been against the Soviet Union, that it would have been a Pyrrhic victory at best.  You try occupying the Soviet Union in wintertime and being not from there.  They got enough woods and sniper rifles that they'll keep shooting you until you're gone.

Then there's also the argument that, unlike Communism, which is essentially like a forest collectivism, like you must join, you must be assimilated and force everyone to join, and kind of makes a promise, like Christianity, that it will save the lowest man from his horrible circumstance and empower him, and all that kind of thing, Nazism is based on, "Screw you", to everyone else.  It's this tiny little collectivism for the very few, and everyone else are the Untermenschen who can all go to hell.  Well, that is stupid and so full of contradictions in the sense of trying to make a sustainable system like that.

You can create this ultimate moral Aryan society and all this, but you draft all the fathers, so not all the sons are raised without fathers and are raised in the streets, committing crimes, and are not supermen at all.  The whole thing is central planning, and Nazism is a totalitarian system; it's Communism in a way.  All central economic planning and societal planning can't possibly work.  But it doesn't even promise to help you, it only promises to push you out of the way at best, and probably kill you.  Whereas, Communism swears that it's here for your own good, and really, really means to save the lowest guy out of the gutter and give him a fair union representative, and whatever garbage rights.

I think that even if you just look at Nazi Germany and just how insane the whole thing was, it couldn't possibly have outlived Hitler anyway, right.  The Nazi Party might have still been something.  But you know what, the Americans saved the Nazi Party and called them the Gehlen Organisation, and put them to work fighting the Soviets under the CIA in the Cold War.  So, it isn't like they were completely obliterated anyway; they just all got new jobs.

Peter McCormack: And I guess, based on this and studying history, you would have concern that the current conflict escalates again, based on poor decision-making?

Scott Horton: I've got to tell you, man, I think I do see a lot of just childishness, like we talked about Neville Chamberlain having his own little nervous breakdown and calling this terrible shot?  I think we see a lot of that.  Skipping way ahead in our story here, Joe Biden, this is what they call it, "He held the Ukraine Brief", when he was the Vice President under Barrack Obama.  I mean, he was in charge of Ukraine policy. 

Well, he was in on the coup, and we know he was, because we've got Robert Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland, 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 'Atta-boy' and make sure that the deeds stick".  So, she's really running Biden's errand as she's plotting the coup d'état with Geoffrey Pyatt on the phone, caught red-handed.  Two weeks before the coup, they did it anyway.

Back to the point though, you think Joe Biden can ever admit that?  Even, I guess, to his homeboys at the table, late at night, "Hey, this is a little bit our fault, we kind of pushed it".  They're never going to do that.  Condoleezza Rice is on TV saying, "I think Vladimir Putin might be mentally ill now".  Oh, he's mentally ill?  He woke up on the wrong side of the bed in the morning, did he?  "He's got a personal problem".  South Park, it was funny, but they say, "Well, he's 55 and his johnson doesn't work quite as well as it used to, so now he's trying to recreate his youth from the 1980s and start the Cold War back up".  It's a funny joke, but that's not what's going on here.

Peter McCormack: It's not a Cold War.

Scott Horton: Sure, it is a Cold War, but it sure doesn't have to be.  To cut right to the chase, the Russians have said, in the most plain Russian, over and over for two decades running, and a half that, "We have some serious security concerns.  You guys keep expanding your military alliance and you keep telling us not to mind, but we can't help but notice that your military alliance is getting right up into our front yard here, and we have these security concerns, and we'd like to be taken seriously, please".  And they've been saying this and saying this and saying this.

You look at Putin's declaration of war; on CNN, they play it on mute in the background while they talk over it, and he just looks mad.  But again, with the "Hitler at the podium ranting" thing, why not go ahead and give us the subtitles and tell us what he's saying?  It's a secret?  Remember after 9/11?  Well, I don't know if they did this over there where you're from.  Here, after 9/11, Bin Laden put out his letter to America, and they wouldn't play it.  They wouldn't print it in the newspaper and show the American people what it said because, "It has secret messages in it that will activate his sleeper cells and make them kill you and your mum.  So, we can't let the American people even hear Osama Bin Laden one time say, 'Here's my list of grievances.  Bill Clinton's killing Iraqis from bases in Saudi, and it's making me ornery'".  Do you understand? 

I mean, I just said that to you and you look, "Yeah, that makes sense".  Yeah, that's what the average person would have made sense too.  We all hate Bill Clinton.  You're telling me you hate Bill Clinton, that's why he knocked the towers down?  That's pretty drastic, but we could understand hating Bill Clinton, so they wouldn't let us know.  The same thing here.  Here's pictures of Vladimir Putin looking like a real tough guy, or a real Bond villain, or a real psycho madman, or a really cranky guy.  Read the text of the thing.  He goes, "You know what, we're really concerned that if you put these missiles here, that their flight time to Moscow would only be eight and a half minutes". 

So, you see.  Does that sound like irrational raving, or does it sound like a guy who's concerned about possible missile installations?  People say that's just a red herring, he's just bringing that up as an excuse.  But again, they've been saying the same thing for 20 years that, "You guys are really pushing your luck with this whole military alliance".

Peter McCormack: Well, there was an agreement not to be released?

Scott Horton: That's right.  Let me go back to the history in one second, but let me make one more sort of metaphysical point before I do, first.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Scott Horton: You hear this all the time, "Well, how come Ukraine doesn't have the right to join whatever military alliance they want?"  You hear that every day, all day.  Well, just think about that.  Is that really true?  Does anyone think for a minute that Canada and Mexico have the right to join into a military alliance with Russia and China?  Or, is that absolutely preposterous, and that in fact, America would do a regime change in Mexico or Ottawa in about a day and a half, if they even began to consider it.  Let the Chinese arm up the Mexicans, build military bases, build naval bases in Mexico, threaten San Diego?  America would go to nuclear war with China for even trying it, and you know it and everybody listening to this show right now knows it.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's history in this.

Scott Horton: Of course.  We wouldn't let them put missiles in Cuba.  You know the absolute just butchery, slaughter of the peasants of El Salvador in Nicaragua, because Ronald Reagan said, "Don't you know that El Salvador's just a day's drive from Harlans and Texans?"  Like, yeah, El Salvador's going to invade Texas!  But there are some Commies down there, and we've got to cut their mothers and sisters and innocent grandparents to pieces with machetes, apparently.  It's not fair, but those are the breaks.  This is a small country in the shadow of a major nuclear weapons state.  That's the easiest way to think about it.

Ukraine is Russia's Canada.  We will tolerate the independence of Canada as long as it remains a friend of ours.  The moment Russia, or some other power, the Lost Continent of Atlantis, or someone else tries to steal Canada away from us, America will go to war; everybody knows that.  It's the same thing here.  You push the analogy further and we'll get caught up on the history, but this is really the analogy, this is really what we're talking about, not just building a military alliance more abstract, but how about if the Russians had won the Cold War, had incorporated all of western Europe into the Warsaw Pact, and then started working on Latin America, and then they came for Canada. 

Then, when the people of Canada voted wrong, the Russians did a coup d'état twice in ten years and overthrew the government in Ottawa.  And the second time, they used a bunch of Hitler-loving Nazis in the street to do it, in a violent street putsch.  They overthrew the government in Ottawa and immediately the new regime starts threatening to kick America out of its naval bases in Alaska, and then it goes to war against the people of British Columbia and Vancouver, who refuse to accept the new coup junta.  All the while, the Russians are sending in billions of dollars' worth of weapons to arm up the new Canadian Government that they've installed in power here.  What do you think would happen then?

Peter McCormack: I know what would happen.

Scott Horton: We'd nuke Moscow, is what would happen.

Peter McCormack: Well, I don't know if that would happen.

Scott Horton: Yeah, I'm pretty sure.

Peter McCormack: We'd maybe do what Russia's doing now; they would enter into Canada and defend their borders.

Scott Horton: At the very least.  And they sure as hell would not have let the war in Vancouver go on for eight years before they rolled their tanks in either.  And yet, Vladimir Putin, who is supposedly the most psychopath on the planet, who'll cut your throat if you just look at him funny, he's supposed to just sit there and take it, no matter what; and we are supposed to expect that, "What's he going to do about it?" is a good enough answer for what he might do about it, like go to war. 

This is what Ron Paul said to Rudy Giuliani in the world-famous Giuliani moment about, "It was Bill Clinton's policy in Iraq, bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi, is what got us attacked on 9/11" and in that he says, "Listen, if we think can just go around the world doing whatever we want and there will be no consequences from that, we do that at our own peril", because of course that's not true.  There will be consequences, and it's just the blindest way of looking at things.

Again, back to this being, in great measure, Joe Biden's fault.  As I've been saying to people, because I'm no partisan, I think you know, this is Bill Clinton, W Bush, Barrack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden's fault.  But when I say Joe Biden, I don't just mean President Biden.  Biden was the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the US Senate, or I guess he was Vice Chair under the Republicans in the 1990s.  He was Chair under W Bush, he was the greatest champion of NATO expansion during that entire time.

Under Obama, he was riding shotgun, Vice President.  Again, pushed all of these same policies, and again held the brief which was, we know, directly involved in the coup in 2014.  So, the only time that Joe Biden hasn't been calling the shots on our Ukraine policy was under Donald Trump; and even then, a bunch of our Ukraine policy was caught up in him and his son's corruption.  Because, why did that gas company Burisma hired, hire Hunter Biden?  It was because they were in tight with the government that Joe Biden had overthrown.  So, they were worried that the new government was going to be hard on them.

So, did they hire a relative of the new regime?  No, they went straight for the son of the Vice President of the United States, who was in on the coup, and we all knew it, because it was on the leaked phone call; they went straight for his son, and bought him up for $1 million as an insurance policy to protect their company from being prosecuted by the new government, which is exactly what happened.  Joe Biden intervened and threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid from Ukraine unless they would fire the prosecutor who was looking into the company.

All the factcheckers will say, "That's not true, because all those investigations were already closed down", but that's not true.  Matt Taibbi did the work and knows Russian and made the calls and did a real investigation, wrote a great report on this, where there were multiple different criminal investigations against Burisma at that time, many of which were still ongoing.  So, those factcheckers are just going off of what somebody claimed in the post one time, that they all just repeat, but that doesn't make it true.  In other words, Joe Biden has been involved absolutely, is up past his eyeballs in responsibility for every bit of this policy for 25 years now. 

So now, he's going to sit there and give a speech where he goes, "Guys, I blew it.  I told you not to worry, the Russian's aren't going to react, it will be fine, and I was wrong.  For 30 years, I was wrong.  Somehow, I got elected President anyway, and here we are"?  No, he's not going to do that, and Bill Clinton's not going to do that, and W Bush and Condoleezza Rice are not going to do that.  I mean, Donald Trump might, just because he doesn't even know his own record on Russia, I guess.

So, back to your real question about, could we blunder into a real conflict here, like the World Wars, that are widely construed to have been blundered into?  I think yes.  I think, look at right now as we're recording this, Antony Blinken is not in Geneva negotiating with Sergeĭ Lavrov; they're not even talking to him.  They told The New York Times, "We're not even talking to him".  Well, who are you talking to; each other?  You're not talking to the Russians?  You're not trying to stop the war?  They're not trying to stop the war, they want the war.

Peter McCormack: Why, why want the war, because this is a lose/lose?  You look at the cancelling of Russia, moving them off SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard and PayPal and everybody closing them down, it's pushing Russia to have to look to alternative financial rails, which it's now been widely reported they will be moving onto the Chinese system, which is damaging for the position of the dollar.

Scott Horton: You see, your problem is, you're thinking in terms of what's good for humanity, what's good for your country, what's good for my country.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but why else?  This feels like a lose/lose.

Scott Horton: Well, the thing is, remember public choice theory.  It's not about what's good for the United States, or even for the interests of the American Empire; it's about what's good for the individuals who are in charge of the thing, doing what they want to do and what they think is in their interest, and they could have a very skewed perception of what's the right thing to do, compared to the way that you would look at it.

So, for example, and this is skipping ahead here, we're going to do the history, I promise!  This is really skipping to the end.  I believe that the reason that I was mistaken a few weeks ago in thinking that this wasn't going to happen, was really because our current CIA Director, William Burns, he used to be the Ambassador to Russia.  When Condoleezza Rice and W Bush were talking about bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO in 2008, he wrote this memo called Nyet Means Nyet, that Bradley Manning, Chelsea Manning leaked, and Julian Assange posted at wikileaks.org; you can read it.

It's Burns explaining, "I talked to Sergeĭ Lavrov today, and he told me in pretty much no uncertain terms, that they'll invade and conquer Ukraine before they let us bring Ukraine into NATO", that they just absolutely cannot tolerate.  Sergeĭ Lavrov is a very polite diplomat.  You read the way he writes it, he's saying, "We don't even believe in this sphere of influence, that's anachronistic, and we recognise that the EU and America have interest in Ukraine, and we're cool with that.  But come on, man, you're going to bring Ukraine into your military alliance?  You realise that that's a whole different thing, and we just can't tolerate that".

So, I stupidly thought that this guy, who's not a spy, he's a diplomat, he's a lifelong foreign service officer, who Biden put in charge of the CIA, he could have picked worse people for CIA Director, by the way.  I thought that this guy, Burns, is going to help navigate Biden through this.  Like, "Look, man, I understand this guy, Lavrov, real well, and I think that we can find a way", but I just was presuming too much.  After all we've been through, man, because I don't like alarmist stuff.  A lot of time, the alarmists are overshooting and I don't want to overshoot, I hate that.  But this time, I wasn't cynical enough about the real goals of the Americans, but now I'm convinced that they wanted the war to happen, and here's my case.  You can read it.  In fact, if you want later, I'll send the email.  Remind me, I'll send the email with all the links so we can have this for your show notes to back this up, okay.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we'll definitely do that.

Scott Horton: We've got David Ignatius, who was the CIA spokesman in the Washington Post, very, very close to the CIA, I believe a former CIA analyst or officer, bureaucrat of some kind; and two news stories, hard news stories in the Washington Post; a piece in The New York Times, at least one piece in The New York Times; a piece in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, it's written by a CIA officer; that piece in Yahoo News by a guy named Zach Dorfman, who he got into great deal here; there was Hilary Clinton's rant on MSNBC; and a piece in CBS News.  These are essentially my sources here.

What they're all saying is this, "We want to bog Russia down and bleed them like we did in Afghanistan in the 1980s".  Now, never mind that, this is what America's been doing to itself and Afghanistan for the last 20 years, and only just called it quits a few months ago, "We want to replicate what we helped the Soviet Union do", killed a million Afghans in the 1980s war, and the Russians just carpet-bombed them in a way that even Obama and Trump never did, and they bombed the hell out of them, but not like the Russians did in the 1980s.

They keep saying it over and over again.  They're sending all these arms.  They don't think they can defeat the Russians, they don't even think they can hold off the Russians for more than a few weeks, they're not stupid.  This is like the US Government goes up against Oklahoma.  It's a fait accompli, man, we know who's going to win this war, it's not a question of that.  Even with all the arms that America has put in there.  And in fact, it sure didn't seem to deter them from invading either, it seemed to only provoke them.

Now, if you take The New York Times' version, and I'm being fair to the devil here, if you take The New York Times' version, they make it clear, "Believe us, man, we really mean it.  This is plan B.  We really, really want to talk Putin out of invading.  But if he does, we want to wage an insurgency against him".  And the thing is, you find all this language where they say, I swear to God you can find this, it will be in the notes; they say, "Listen, we may not know the first thing about how to defeat an insurgency, but we sure know how to back one, like we did in Afghanistan in the 1980s.  Never mind the last 20 years in Afghanistan, it doesn't count.  Like we did in Afghanistan in the 1980s and like we did in Syria".

Don't you just love that?  All the butchery and the rise of the Islamic State and all the suicide bombings and head-choppings and 500,000 people killed, millions of people displaced, Syria turned absolutely upside down; a war absolutely at least as bad as Iraq War too, or Yemen, just an absolute catastrophe.  And they just brag about it, "You know what we did to Syria when we backed all those suicide bombers and tore that country to shreds under Obama?  We want to do that again in Ukraine right now.  In Europe, we want to do that right now, and we want to give them Stinger guided anti-aircraft missiles and the highest-tech Javelin shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles.  And we want to give them all these trucks and all these weapons".

Then, who are the "stay-behind" forces, as they call them?  They don't call them Mujahideen, although we'll get to the Mujahideen, because they're involved in this too.

Peter McCormack: I've read about that today.

Scott Horton: That's right.  So, we'll get back to that in a second, but they call them stay-behind forces.  That's a reference to Operation Gladio in Europe in the Cold War.  In western Europe, they had what they called the stay-behind groups, who were right-wing militias who, in the event that the Soviets ever did invade, these would be the core of the insurgency, if it ever went down like that.  And it all became a big scandal, you might have heard of this.  They all got busted, the P2 Masonic lodge in Italy got caught, because they'd been doing all these assassinations and were involved in all this corruption. 

Like the Grey Wolves in Turkey, who kept the secularist militarists in charge, and kept the Islamists out.  In fact, they did a lot of the Communist terrorism.  I don't know percentage-wise, but a lot of the Communist terrorism in Europe in the later Cold War, was all false-flag, right-wing stuff, doing it set up to make it look like it was the Reds and stuff like that.  That was the stay-behind groups; that's what they call them.

So anyway, who are the stay-behinds?  This is what they call them right now, that's what they're calling them right now; who are the stay-behind groups they want in Ukraine?  They're a bunch of Hitler-loving Nazis, man.  These are the proud grandsons of the Nazis that fought for Hitler in World War II, who perpetrated the Holocaust in Ukraine, killed hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews.  And, they were the ones who were the bleeding edge that did the coup in 2014. 

There were a lot of regular people protesting out in the street, but it was the Nazis who killed the cops and had the snipers pulled the people, as a false flag, to agitate the crowd, and then seized the government buildings and drove the President out of town.  And it was the right sector, the Svoboda Party, C14, the Azov Battalion, and these guys are proud Nazis, Swastikas and Wolfsangels and all of their black sons and eagles and whatever, all of their Nazi regalia everywhere.

The leader of the Azov Battalion, which is a major part of the Ukrainian National Guard that's been fighting against the pro-Russian separatists in the East, had said it.  The whole purpose of the Azov Battalion was to lead the fight to rid the semitic-led Untermenschen from the takeover of the world, or whatever crap; and these guys are Nazis, man.  In fact, they're not even neo-Nazis, like some idiot in Alabama sitting in prison, or whatever, with no shirt or shoes; these are really the grandsons of the Nazis.  These are the guys who fought for Hitler, really, in the war, and that's whose side the Americans are on.

Now, check this out.  I'm skipping ahead some more, but we're going to go through chronologically, I promise.

Peter McCormack: It's fine.

Scott Horton: Have you guys ever heard of the Chicken Kiev Speech?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I have.

Scott Horton: George H W Bush, okay.  It was called the Chicken Kiev Speech by William Safire, the neoconservative hawk at The New York Times.  Well, I don't know if he was a neocon, certainly he was a conservative hawk and a very hard-core Zionist.  Anyway, Safire called it the Chicken Kiev Speech. 

It was written by Condoleezza Rice for H W Bush.  It's August 1991 and H W Bush goes essentially -- nobody knows this, it's funny as hell, but this is really true.  The Bush Senior Government tried to save the Soviet Union from collapse.  They wanted to see the Warsaw Pact states go, but they wanted to see Russia keep the republics, which I'm not exactly sure which all of the republics, but it's definitely the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine.  I'm not sure if it ever included Slovakia and Slovenia and all that.  Well, no Czechoslovakia, it didn't; Slovenia, may have.  I think some of the South Asian Stans may have been considered republics, not that any of these were republics, they were Communist dictatorships, by the way, we're just talking about their terminology for them. 

But anyway, what was I saying?

Peter McCormack: Chicken Kiev Speech.

Scott Horton: So, he's trying to hold the USSR together, and he goes to Kiev and he tells the central committee, he says, "Freedom is not the same as independence, and the United States will not support an effort to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism.  And we warn you against the --", he said something, "about the extremism of ethnic resentment", etc.  He's talking about these far right-wing Ukrainian nationalists, and he knows who they are good and well, because he's the former Director of Central Intelligence, George Herbert Walker Bush.  He knows very good and well who are the extreme right-wing nationalists in Ukraine; they're all the way to the right as far as you can go.

He's warning them, "Listen, Moscow is giving you freedom right now.  You need to be happy with that.  But we won't support any move for independence on anything but Moscow's timetable, and you right-wing nationalist types, you'd better cool it and be warned that you're not going to get any support from us".  And then, Safire mocked him from that, probably rightly in a way, "What do you mean, you're trying to save the USSR?  The evil empire's falling apart".  I mean, as we're about to talk about, the whole original sin here is expanding NATO into their environment, into Russia's front door, but keep the USSR?  America intervene to help, try to hold the USSR up?

Thank goodness that didn't work, it was just a few months later.  That was in August and by December 1991, that was the end of it.  Christmas Day, the flag came down; 25 December 1991, the red flag came down, the red, white and blue flag came up, and that was absolutely the end of that.  But it goes to show, well there's two important points there.  One was, H W Bush's, "Hey, let's all be cool and friends and not cause too much counterreaction during the fall of the Soviet Union", the way he treated the USSR during that time? provoked minimal counterreaction.  He could have, as he put it, he could have gone and danced on the Berlin Wall.  Instead, he stayed home and said, "We're really happy the wall came down.  That will be enough for tonight", and he didn't mock them for it, because he didn't want to provoke an overreaction, and he didn't.  By the end of 1991, the thing was gone, gone, gone.  

Then, the second thing is, it reveals that H W Bush knew a thing or two about Ukraine and what kind of danger it could be.  He could have a brand-new war break out here on the northern part of the Black Sea, right at the fall of this kind of peaceful dissolution of the USSR; you could have a brand-new war here.  And he wanted them to know, "We don't have your back". 

One more thing about that, as long as we're talking about the CIA's efforts to back the Ukrainian's efforts before, this just came out in The Los Angeles Times just last week.  It says, "We backed resistance, insurgent forces in Ukraine before the CIA did, and here's what happened", and it's an intelligence historian, and he's quoting from an official CIA declassified history of their intervention in Ukraine in the 1950s, and they wrote, this is the CIA's historian's words; he says, "We knew that these people couldn't possibly win.  There was no way in the world they were going to free Ukraine from Soviet domination.  We were just trying to bleed the Russians, make life 1% more difficult for them, basically.  And we knew that we were just sending these people to their deaths".

Peter McCormack: And that's the same as what's happening now?

Scott Horton: I think that's the same as what's happening now, that they would rather…  I mean, if you go back, especially now that it's already on, if you go back and look at all the arms they've been pouring into the Ukraine and into the Ukrainian military for the last eight years, is that just to fight the Donbas?  The New York Times says, "The arms that they put in were carefully calibrated not to provoke the Russians into overreacting and invading".  So now, you tell me, did they calibrate it to provoke an invasion, or do they just suck at calibrating, and they thought they were calibrating it just right, as they told The Times, but they didn't?  That's their own words.

Their version of the story is, "Hi, New York Times, this is the dangerous-as-hell game we were playing".  And even if you take the innocent interpretation of it, they really screwed up and caused the reaction they promised wouldn't happen.  If you want to take the worst interpretation, they calibrated it this way on purpose, and were trying to jerk Putin's chain and get him to do it.

Peter McCormack: Are there just possible multiple miscalculations here, miscalculation on the front of the US and NATO? 

Scott Horton: Yes, yes.

Peter McCormack: And in return, has Putin miscalculated his response?

Scott Horton: Maybe.  Well, hold that one for a second.  But just on the Americans, I mean these people are crazy and stupid and full of themselves, and I don't know what they're thinking at any given time, and it's just a circumstantial case.  I'm not trying to be a conspiracy nut here, whatever, I'm perfectly happy to call speculation, speculation, but we have seen this before. 

We know that, for example, they deliberately started backing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the summer of 1979, because they were trying to provoke the Soviets into invading Afghanistan, "To give them their own Vietnam", as they said at the time.  Now they're saying, "We want to give them their own Afghanistan again".  So, there's certainly precedent for it, but I'm not saying I know for sure, but I'm speculating. 

But here's a couple of reasons why I'm more and more convinced they wanted this to happen.  The Americans have this policy, they say, "We have an open door to NATO, and if any country wants to join NATO, nobody else can say that they can't, and that's a sacred principle".  Now, Putin goes, "Listen, man, I don't want you bringing Ukraine into NATO".  And Biden said, and including on the phone to him on 30 December, "We have no intention of bringing Ukraine into NATO, not any time in the next ten years".  So Putin says, "Put it in writing", and Biden says, "No, go to hell, I won't put it in writing, because that would be you closing the door, and we can't let anyone else close the door".  So, I'm saying, "Well, you close the door then.  Don't let Putin close it, you close it".

We already know the Germans don't want Ukraine into NATO; it would be crazy to do that, and they've had to fight Russia before, man.  It was the worst thing that ever happened, twice.  And they're going, "This is crazy, we don't want to do this".  They stopped Bush from bringing Ukraine in back in 2008.  So, it's essentially off the table; but what does Biden do?  He refuses to put it in writing, and then he continues to, in the words of John Mearsheimer, the Dean of the Realist School of Foreign Policy Scholars in the United States of America, from the University of Chicago, "Biden made them a de facto member of NATO, by integrating their military forces into ours, in terms of command and control, dumping literally billions of dollars' worth of weapons in there and creating a situation where, if you're in Moscow, it doesn't make much difference whether they're an official member of NATO or not".

So, Putin is saying, "Look, man, why can't we just agree that Ukraine be neutral?"  This is what he says in his ranting speech.  He's saying it was such a horrible mistake for Gorbachev to let the republics go.  He agreed with H W Bush, "Gorbachev should have never let those republics go, because", he says, "independence for Ukraine might have been fine.  But evidently there's no such thing, the Americans will run off with it.  The Americans are determined".  He said, "Right now, Ukraine is a colony with a puppet regime in Kyiv", which is true.  Independence would be one thing, but the Americans want to militarily dominate this country right on our border, a couple of hundred miles from our capital city.

Peter McCormack: One thing I didn't realise until recently within NATO is, I understood that the nuclear states of NATO were France, the UK and the USA.  I wasn't aware until recently that the USA has been deploying their nukes across Europe.

Scott Horton: Right, so the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty kept medium-range missiles out of Europe, but I believe there are still bombers stationed in Germany, I don't know where else.  But I believe there are still nuclear bombers based in Germany; and of course, definitely they are at the Incirlik Base in Turkey, where they have H Bombs still stored, but those are for bombers, not mid-range missiles.  Trump tore up that treaty.  Let's go back and do the chronology here.

Peter McCormack: Yes, let's do that, please.

Scott Horton: I'm the worst, I'm sorry I'm all over the place, I hope people are enjoying this.

Peter McCormack: No, it's great, this is fascinating.  I mean, my difficulty is, I don't have obviously as deep an understanding of the history as you, but if we were talking about Bitcoin, I would be challenging you on things.  Sometimes, I just have to listen.

Scott Horton: Take some notes and call me a liar later, we'll work it out!  So, I'll tell you what, here's what we're going to do.  You're supposed to tell them what you're going to tell them before you tell them, and then tell them and then tell them what you told them, right.  So, I'm going to tell you what I'm about to tell you!  That is that it's Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden's fault.  As I said, Biden in on it the whole time, no partisan favour here, they're all guilty as hell, nobody's innocent here; they're all equally guilty as each other.

What it is, is it's NATO expansion, it's tearing up nuclear treaties, it's installing anti-ballistic-missile missiles in Romania and Poland and radars in the Czech Republic; and the fact that those missiles are launched form dual-use launchers, the Mk 41 Missile Launcher, that can be used to launch Tomahawk Cruise Missiles, that can be tipped with H Bombs.  Then, it's the colour-coded revolutions, where America overthrew the governments of a dozen countries in Russia's near abroad, and for the crime of being friendly to Russia, including as I said, Ukraine twice in ten years, 2004 and 2014.

Then, it's the militarisation of Ukraine, the threat to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, and the expanded harassment of Russia by our Navy and the British Navy as well, and our Air Force in the Black, Baltic and Okhotsk Seas; that's in the Far East.  What they do is they constantly fly up with their long-range nuclear bombers, they fly right up to 12.5 miles off of the coast, and constantly do it to test their radars and defences, and sail in all their ships up the Black Sea and all of this in a way that is totally unnecessary.  What are you doing; preventing piracy or something?  They have no business doing this, it's all provocation.  Again, you could really interpret it as being calibrated to cause this result, certainly in the last few years here.

Danny Knowles: Can I just ask something?

Scott Horton: Sure.

Danny Knowles: Do Russia do a similar thing, because I know often ships are seen off Scotland, and things like that?

Scott Horton: I'm not as sure about what they're doing in the channel, but I know they don't mess around in the Gulf of Mexico, and they don't surface -- it's been a very long time since they were sailing warships off of the coast of the United States.

Peter McCormack: They do do it, and what they do is they send certain planes as well off towards the British Coast, then they're often escorted away by British Planes, which my understanding is -- and this happens across Europe.  My understanding is, this is them testing response times.

Scott Horton: Yeah, I'm sure it is.  But you see, even if you take for granted, which fine, I do, the worst of Russian behaviour, let's even say they started it, they do it first and we're just responding, which I don't think is right; but even if that's true, well let's sit down and sign a thing where we quit doing this.  Immediately, that's what you do.  Figure it out, knock it out.  You don't just escalate back and forth, bring some shit back and forth.  The Soviet Union's dead and gone 30 years, why do we have to have a fight with Russia of any kind?  So, they're harassing the Scottish, "We want you to leave them alone, what the hell are you doing?  We'll leave you alone too.  What are we doing harassing you in the Black Sea when we don't need to be there?"  So, that's the deal.

All right, now H W Bush, as you said correctly, promised Mikhail Gorbachev, "If you pull your troops out of Germany, we will not expand NATO one inch to the East".  Now, they kind of meant that in two ways.  "We won't even expand inside Germany east of the Elbe River", but they also, in numerous places, were quoted as saying, "That also means we can never bring Poland into NATO, we can never bring any of these countries into NATO.  We promise not to expand the NATO Alliance east of Germany", and Gorbachev believed them and pulled his troops back, and let all of eastern Europe go, and brought his troops back behind the Ural Mountains.

Now, Bill Clinton comes in and essentially, for political reasons, he disregards this.  He wants Lockheed dollars.  It was Lockheed that created the Committee for NATO Expansion, "This is all about collective security".  It's all about selling fighter jets, money for nothing, Polish votes in Illinois and other places, so the Senate was playing the same game too.  This is a margin, if we can get -- I don't know where you have big Czech and Hungarian populations in America, but certainly there are a lot of Poles here, and there are certain cities where this could really make the difference to whether they go Republican or Democrat this year, kind of thing.  So, all these kinds of politics were really behind it.

As the critics at the time said, "In Europe, nobody's threatening anybody.  Why would you even need an alliance at all?"  Pat Buchannan and Ron Paul of course said, "Hey, the Cold War's over, we should abolish NATO altogether, bring all our troops home.  Germany and France, if they want to create their own little European, Continental security organisation, let them, but we can come home".  "Be a normal country in a normal time", Ronald Reagan's UN Ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick said.  But that wasn't good enough for these guys, essentially.  That permanent military industrial complex has to have an enemy, they had to figure something out.

So, they started going to war in Latin America against drug dealers, going to war against Saddam Hussein, and containing Iran and all the dual-containment policy of the 1990s in the Middle East, and expanding NATO and finding something to do, essentially.  And so, the first thing they did was they brought in, on the first round, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.  Now, at the time that they did this, never even mind our heroes like Ron Paul, who warned them not to do this. 

But in fact, the greyest of the greybeards from the Council on Foreign Relations, as they call them, the most prominent, centrist, foreign policy establishment guys from the Rockefeller institutions, they were all against it too.  Henry Kissinger spoke against it, at least a little.  Brent Scowcroft, who was H W Bush's right-hand man, former General, co-wrote his memoirs with him, National Security Advisor and closest friend, was against it.  George Kennan, who had coined the containment policy in 1946 against the Soviet Union at the dawn of the Cold War, with his article on the Sources of Soviet Conduct in Foreign Affairs.  Then his rival, Paul Nitze, who favoured the rollback of Soviet Communism policy, who was to the right of Kennan, and he was the author of the infamous memo, NSC-68, that really declared the American world empire.

Then you had Robert McNamara, the Butcher of Japan, Korea and Vietnam, Secretary of Defense during Vietnam, killed millions of people, this guy; the Butcher of Asia, him and Harry Truman.  And then you had Stansfield Turner and Robert Gates, former CIA Directors.  Now, at that time, to be CIA Director meant you were not just Director of the CIA, it meant you were also the Director of Central Intelligence, which meant you were the boss of all of America's intelligence agencies, like the National Intelligence Director is now.  And you know Robert Gates, from being George Bush's Secretary of Defense, and then Obama kept him until 2011. 

They opposed this, they all opposed this.  And Susan Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower's granddaughter, got together a group of 50 of these people, including all of the senators who actually -- I mean, I know this sounds crazy nowadays; back then, you actually had senators who actually read books and stuff and new anything about anything at all.  So, you had Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Sam Nunn and Bill Bradley, and all these guys who were real experts on China. 

I don't know everything about Nunn and Bradley, but I know that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a real anti-Soviet hawk.  And here he's saying, in The New York Times, you can read this, he says, "We should not be doing this.  This is like an iron chain around Russia's throat.  Why would we do that?  These are the heroes who destroyed the Soviet Union and we want to come and get right in their face and pick a fight?"  And I swear this is true, Peter, in The New York Times it says, "Then, Senator Joe Biden, of the Foreign Relations Committee, started stomping around the Senate floor, flailing his arms in the air saying, 'I don't know what you're talking about.  It's going to be just fine, no problem'".

Now, all of these guys said the same thing.  They didn't say, "This is a waste of money", they didn't say, "This is a boondoggle", they didn't say, "Let those selfish French pay for their own damn defence", or any kind of thing like that.  There was essentially one and only criticism, which is, "You're going to pick a fight with Russia, the Russian heroes who destroyed the Soviet Union, and you're going to do this in the name of not picking a fight with Russia at all, you're going to do it in the name of providing more collective security under your security umbrella, and it's going to be fine?"  That was what they said. 

The NATO expanders said, "It's going to be fine, this isn't even directed at Russia.  We just figure, this is really the best way to integrate all of Europe into kind of a United States of Europe.  We want to expand the EU, we want to open immigration, open capital flows, open everything in the neo-liberal EU, up to and including Russia; why not?  And NATO is just part of that".  And in fact, it's Pax Americana.  You'd never even worry that in this day and age, or hopefully anyway, certainly for the last 160 years, the States don't go to war with each other.  Washington DC guarantees a Pax Americana between Maine and California, between Florida and Washington State. 

But then, any government big enough to keep the peace between the 50 States is big enough to try to keep the peace in the whole world and declare themselves the World Army.

Peter McCormack: The World Police.

Scott Horton: Right, that's right.  So, if you listen to them tell it, when they're not going, "Lockheed dollars!", but they're trying to sound idealistic about this, they go, "Look, this is how we keep the Czechs and the Slovakians and the Slovenians and the Romanians and everyone from fighting, is we just integrate them all into one big army under us".  Then of course, America being the land of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and Abraham Lincoln and justice and honesty and liberty, "You can trust us with that kind of power", because it's all selfless, it's the liberal-rules-based international order.  It's peace without victory, right, "We're not trying to conquer Europe, we're just doing what's best for you all", is how the whole empire is dressed up.  That's the public relations for it all.

But then, here's the thing.  George Kennan, the guy who coined the containment policy in 1946, in 1997 he wrote an essay to The New York Times saying, "Please don't do this, I'm begging you not to do this", for these same reasons.  But even better, in 1998, he gave an interview to Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, called Now a Word From X, and it's called that because when he wrote on the Sources of Soviet Conduct in 1946, it was signed X, because he still worked for the State department at the time.  I think he was Ambassador of Russia at the time, so it was signed X.  So, he's famously X, George Kennan.

So, the article was called Now a Word From X, and Kennan is stomping his feet.  He's 92 years old, and he's screaming at Thomas Friedman.  You can just tell in the way that he's just absolutely adamant.  It sounds like he's going to have a stroke and he's saying, "Don't you see that there's nobody threatening anyone in Europe right now, and you're creating this military alliance and you're pointing it directly at Russia's frontier.  They're going to take it as a threat.  And then, all the people now who are saying, 'Don't worry, the Russians won't react, it will be fine', when the Russians do react, like I'm warning you right now they're going to, all these people are going to say, 'Oh, see, the Russians are so aggressive, and that's why we have to expand NATO, it's to defend Europe from their aggression'".

Then he says, "But that is just wrong".  George Kennan's prediction then is our reality right now, it's as simple as that.  As we talked about, all the people responsible for this policy NATO expansion, they could never admit it, they could never just say, "Jeez, I guess George Kennan was right and we were wrong.  Maybe we shouldn't have listened to John McCain and Joe Biden and Bill Clinton and W Bush about what's the best thing to do in the world".

Back to the inevitability of how World War II played out.  Does it really sound so inevitable when you just phrase it that way?  Bill Clinton and George W Bush made choices, do you like that?  Does that sound like the wind of time blowing and the page of history turning, or just corrupt, terrible, dim-witted people doing stupid, narrow-minded things that they should not do, even when they're told better not to do it by their betters, by the people that they consider their betters, telling them not to?  Not me saying, "Ron Paul is your better", but the people that they think are their betters.

I mean seriously, you think about this.  You have H W Bush's alter ego, Brent Scowcroft.  When he speaks, people believe that he speaks for H W Bush.  In October 2002, he wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, called Don't Attack Saddam, and everyone understood that this was the father sending a message to his son, by way of his trusted friend and advisor.  That's who Scowcroft is.  Now, in my timeline, in my universe, where I rule things, when Brent Scowcroft says, "This is unwise that we would be provoking a conflict with Russia unnecessarily", I think you should stop and listen to that, needle-scratch-off-the-record kind of a moment. 

Robert McNamara, the Butcher of Vietnam, is going, "Whoa, Peter, hold your horses, bro, I don't think you should be doing this".  He's always worse than you on everything.  So, if he's better than you on this, you should probably move a click left, you know what I mean; this is just not right!  You know what I mean by left in this circumstance?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but so this is why we need everyone around the world to be holding a Ukrainian flag and saying, "Stand with Ukraine", as a misdirection from even considering the things here that you're talking about.

Scott Horton: Yeah.  Well, so let's go through W Bush here for a minute.  Wait, let's finish with Clinton real quick.  Clinton not only expanded NATO, he sent what's called The Harvard Boys over to Russia to fix their economy and help them transition from Communism to Capitalism.  You ready for this?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Scott Horton: When they switched from a Marxist economy to a Capitalist one, life expectancy went down by double digits across the board.

Peter McCormack: What year was this?

Scott Horton: From 1993 through 1999, 2000, the entire Clinton regime years.

Peter McCormack: Was that under Yeltsin?

Scott Horton: Under Boris Yeltsin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because that was when the tried to -- because I watched an Adam Curtis documentary recently about this, and he explained how, under Yeltsin, it was a complete disaster, they moved to this laissez-faire economy.

Scott Horton: Well, that's what Adam Curtis calls it, but what it wasn't was a laissez-faire economy at all.

Peter McCormack: No, because it was the oligarchs taking over, and there was this interesting bit where they talk, when Putin came in, and he explained that -- and I'm not defending this or saying it's right, I'm just saying, he came with a bit more of an iron fist and said, "People here care more about being able to keep their lights on and feeding their family, than they care about free speech and general freedoms".  And I'm not defending it, because I don't want to live in Russia.

Scott Horton: All I'm saying is, that was the position Bill Clinton had put them in.

Peter McCormack: But it failed.

Scott Horton: Well, I guess I can have a strong man and bread, or I can have freedom and lay down and die.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Scott Horton: But I mean, just think about everything you know about how stupid central planning is, how absolutely nonsensical Marxism is and government intervention, to a good Austrian.  Any government intervention, even if you justify it and like it somehow.

Peter McCormack: I'm not an Austrian though!

Scott Horton: Well, you should be. 

Peter McCormack: I'm getting nearer!

Scott Horton: Well, to a good libertarian -- even if you're not, even if you can come up with 100 different government programmes that you support, you can still see how they caused distortions in the market.  You think it's worth it, but it causes a problem there.  Well, in this case, this is all central planning.  It's just going from communist central planning to neo-liberal central planning, which is not libertarianism, it isn't laissez-faire.

The idea was, and they did this in a lot of Europe, in eastern Europe, they were able to complete this in a way that made sense, the idea would be, if it was you and me in charge and we didn't have a dog in the hunt and we weren't trying to make $10 million off of this, we were just trying to help the people, we would try to do a thing where you would take all the biggest industries in the country, and then you divide the shares of stock and the ownership of those companies to the people, and then you make sure the courts honour those contracts for real.  Then, let capitalism reign from there, off to the races, right.

Instead, it was just a scam, where they did that at first, but then all those pieces of paper became worthless.  It was entirely separate pieces of paper between gangsters that were the only ones that were honoured.  So, they called it the Loans For Shares.  First, it was the vouchers and then the loans for shares, which just meant the American taxpayer, through the IMF, giving billions of dollars to some few individual former KGB types, and letting them then buy up all those shares of the ownership of those companies, and then they're just the worst criminals in the world.  They're real gangsters and murderers, people like Boris Berezovsky and all of these guys.

So then, just as you're saying, when Putin came in, he started arresting them, exiling them, confiscating their stuff, and he turned it over -- well, he kept some of the more compliant ones, and then he turned the stuff he'd taken over to friends, and the new deal was, "You guys stay out of politics".  But they're just as corrupt.  I mean, it's a whole new system of oligarchs.  I mean, he had the benefit of George Bush's oil boom; I guess Joe Biden's given him another one now, but they never set up a truly prosperous economy of capitalism, free market capitalism, under Putin either.  It's a mixed economy, like America's is; it's oligarchical collectivism!

Peter McCormack: But how do you feel about people like Boris Berezovsky facing confiscation orders right now and sanctions?

Scott Horton: Well, they murdered him.  I mean, I'm not sure who murdered him.  Probably one of his own guys murdered him.

Peter McCormack: Oh, really?

Scott Horton: Yeah, in Britain.

Peter McCormack: No, that was --

Scott Horton: They hanged him in his bathroom.

Peter McCormack: Boris Berezovsky?  I thought Boris Berezovsky was the guy now.  Who's the guy who had the yacht taken from him? 

Scott Horton: Is it Abramov?  Oh, it's on the tip of my tongue. 

Peter McCormack: No, Abramovich is Chelsea.

Scott Horton: Oh, Abramovich, that's who I'm thinking of. 

Peter McCormack: No, he's the Chelsea guy.  The guy who had his yacht taken was somebody else.

Scott Horton: I'm not sure.  Honestly, I'm not up on the very latest on that.

Peter McCormack: I'm just wondering how you feel about people like that facing confiscation orders, these oligarchs?

Scott Horton: Well, I mean all of this is --

Peter McCormack: Theatre?

Scott Horton: All their gains are ill-gotten gains, I'm sure, but then it's all lawless.  The US Treasury Department is the second scariest organisation on the planet after the CIA, or the Pentagon, depends how you slice it; the top three right there, then the IRS after that, I guess.  But no, I mean the Treasury Department can essentially wage a lawless economic war against anyone on the planet, just with their will.  You hear about people deprived of cancer medicine in Iran.  We don't have direct sanctions on chemotherapy chemicals, right, but what we do have is a terror regime where no major shipper wants to even stop by Iran; they'll just keep on sailing and go somewhere else, rather than risk tangling with the Treasury.  So, kids die of cancer.  That's the real American way right there; they wage this economic war against people all the time, it's really bad. 

So, I don't stand for any of that.  I mean, I'm not crying for Abramovich if somebody takes his biggest boat away, or whatever, but…  It's like, there was this guy in California who kidnapped this 14-year-old girl, killed her family and kidnapped her and took her out to the Badlands of Utah somewhere, and they sent the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, the Waco Butchers, to go after and try to find here.  And some campers had found her and tipped them off.  And they just straight-up murdered this guy. 

Now, he deserved to be murdered, right, you know what he was doing to that little girl.  Fine, murder him, but wait a minute, who are these guys and who gives them the authority to murder somebody?  Does this guy have it coming?  Sure.  Did they have the authority to murder?  No.  He was not presenting a direct lethal threat to them or to the girl at the moment they killed him.  They were just like, "There he is", and shot him.  So, same kind of thing.  Are these guys criminals?  Sure.  Should we let a lawless totalitarian government persecute them for us, because it fits our emotional whim at the time?  No, we should not, we've got to be more principled than that. 

So then, W Bush comes in.  W Bush starts bringing more countries into NATO, and in fact Putin calls Bush on 9/11.  He's the first President to call Bush.  He says, "I'm totally at your service, I'm your humble servant, man.  You've got my air space, you want to go to Afghanistan?  Fine.  You want bases in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan?  As soon as I get off the phone with you, I'm going to call them and let them know that their bases are now at your service".  And he had to face down politicians on his right and in the military in order to do so.  He said, "This is my chance to make friends with this W Bush guy", and after all, it was America that was switching sides in the Afghanistan War, not Russia.

So, be my guest, pal.  You want to after the Muj for us?  Go ahead.  Three months later, Bush tears up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which is the missile defence treaty, and this is just a boondoggle.  I just interviewed a nuclear weapons expert, named Jo Cirincione, about this a couple of weeks ago; it doesn't work, man.  Shooting a bullet with a bullet in the cold of outer space where all your infrared doesn't even work anyway, and all this stuff, it's a hoax.  The only time they've ever succeeded in shooting a missile down with a missile was when they rigged the test and they told this missile where this one was going to be in advance, down to the millisecond.  The whole thing is a scam, always was.

But as Putin explained to Oliver Stone in an interview, "You ring my country with anti-missile missiles, what am I going to do, dude?"  And Oliver Stone says, "Yeah, come on, Mr Putin, you know that that's just a boondoggle, that they're just ripping off the American taxpayer and stealing their money.  They aren't going to be shooting down a missile with a missile, and all this crap".  And Putin says, "Yeah, look, Oliver Stone, I know you're right, that's probably right.  But hey, I'm in charge of security, dude, what am I supposed to do?  We have mutually assured destruction, now you're seemingly working on the capability to shoot down any retaliatory strike that I might fire off if you hit me first.  So, you see, I just have to make more and better missiles, I have to escalate too.  What am I going to do?"

Then, just a couple of years after that, I think that was in 2016 when he talked to Stone.  And then 2018, he debuted an entire new generation of nuclear weapons, a new heavy rocket that goes over the South Pole instead of the North Pole so you don't even have any pretended defences there, and carries enough multiple warheads that it could kill every city in Texas with just one missile.  It could kill El Paso, Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, Corpus, Antonio, Houston, Galveston, Port Arthur, all of us dead, one missile; a new nuclear power torpedo, dead silent, and H-Bomb-armed to take out any port city, or any naval base anywhere in the world.

They claim a new nuclear-powered cruise missile that essentially has unlimited range, could fly around the world ten times, or whatever, and hit any target from any direction and avoid defences; and then the hypersonics that they claim go faster than Mach 5, and Putin actually says in the speech, Mach 10, which I don't know about that.  I suppose anything is possible, which of course reduces reaction time to five minutes.  A missile fired from the mid-Atlantic will hit Washington DC in five minutes.  You have no time at all even to get to the bunker, or to make a choice other than to fire off everything, which having half an hour to decide isn't great anyway.  But having five minutes is nothing, and could lead to absolutely panic decisions.

Then Putin said in that speech, "Listen, I tried to tell you guys not to tear up that treaty, I begged you not to tear up that treaty.  You put me in this position.  You wouldn't listen and you wouldn't listen, and I bet you can hear me now".  Again, I'm just a reporter here relaying the facts to you, dude.  I'm not a Russian partisan, I'm from Austin, Texas myself, this is my city here.

Peter McCormack: Well, I watched your video, you criticise Putin at the same time.  You can hold both views.

Scott Horton: Sure, but this is not his side of the story, it's just the truth.  Look at what happened.  W Bush tore up this treaty, "So, what are they going to do about it?"  Well, what did he get in exchange?  He got an anti-missile system that doesn't work, it was only just good for stealing money.  And on the other side, we're now losing an arms race to these guys who have an entire new generation of nuclear weapons where, not that I'm advocating that we have been working on our side, but our side was busy patrolling Pashtuns in Paktika, while these guys were building new H Bombs, and while the Americans are just getting into a fight, again on the premise of, "What are they going to do about it?"  Well, they're going to build a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, is what they're going to do about it.

He also did the colour-coded revolutions.  This started under Clinton, but Bush continued it.  They did Armenia and Belarus, they did Serbia.  They won against Milošević in 2000.  They did the Rose Revolution, where they overthrew Shevardnadze and installed Saakashvili in Georgia in 2003.  They did the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, where Yanukovych won the election but they claimed it was rigged and that the Russians had poisoned their guy, Yushchenko, and they held this big pseudo-revolution out there, with all the big orange banners and all the American money, and succeeded in re-running the election and putting their guy in.

Then they did the Tulip Revolution in Tajikistan, which succeeded but was short-lived.  I think the Russians counteracted and overthrew the guy right back again.  They did the attempted Denim Revolution in Belarus; you know where Belarus is?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Scott Horton: They tried to overthrow the government in Belarus in the Denim Revolution of 2005.  They tried it again last year, remember that?  They were trying to put the wife of the guy, of a dissident in there.  This is an American regime change operation, same thing again, just as the RAND Corporation had recommended that they do.

Peter McCormack: Do you not believe Lukashenko rigged the elections himself?

Scott Horton: Oh, he very well might have, but that doesn't mean his dissidents aren't all bought and paid for by the NED and by their allies, by the Poles, and whoever else is intervening on America's path there, you know what I mean.  I think it's virtually certain that that was an American operation. 

In fact, I asked an expert, named Lyle Goldstein, who is from the Naval War College, is now at Defence Priorities, who is a real expert on this stuff, why -- again, I'm skipping ahead in this story, but why, when Putin could have absorbed the Donbas back in the 2014 war, in 2015, when they asked to join Russia, he didn't then, but he decided to now.  He said, he thinks what changed was the revolution, so-called, in Belarus last year, that in Moscow -- it wasn't just Putin, it was in Moscow, the idea was, "These Americans are just relentless, they'll just stop at nothing.  We've got to draw a line somewhere, we have to stop them from doing this", and that that was really what changed and spurred on the events of the last year, the build-up and the rest.

Anyway, then there's the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009, and then culminating in Barrack Obama's coup in 2014.  That's the colour-coded revolutions.  Now also, when they brought in the Baltic States, which two of the three of them directly border Russia, one of them directly borders Belarus, but then there's also this strip of land called Kaliningrad between the Baltic States and Poland, which is also Russian territory.  So in a way, all three of them border Russia.  They brought in the Baltics, and they promised to bring in Ukraine and Georgia.  Now, Germany stopped them from bringing Ukraine and Georgia in.  This is in April 2008, but they still issued the Bucharest Declaration that said, "We promise to bring Ukraine and Georgia in".

This is three or four months after Burns had written to Condoleezza Rice, "Nyet means Nyet.  This is a red line, we should not do this".  And there's this horrible woman, Fiona Hill, who was from Brookings and was involved in the Russiagate hoax, and was involved in the Ukrainegate, son of Russiagate impeachment hoax and all that.  She's a so-called Russia expert from Brookings.  She worked for Obama, and she's on the record saying that the CIA and the other intelligence agencies -- I guess, she worked for Bush too, pardon me, but she was later an Obama-ite, I believe, but worked under W Bush also in the State department.

She said, on the record, that the intelligence agencies told Bush not to issue the declaration, that, "We can't bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.  The Russians consider that a red line, we should not be doing that".  That was the official estimate and advice of the CIA, and they went ahead and did it anyway.  Four months later, due almost certainly to that, as well as other assurances, or hints of assurance that they had gotten from the Bush Administration that spring, Mikhail Saakashvili launched an attack in August 2008 against a breakaway province, called South Ossetia.  This is in the Southern Caucasus Mountains.

This is the American empire.  We have a border dispute with Russia in the Southern Caucasus Mountains.  For everybody, I know everyone listening is a master of geography, we're talking about between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, okay.  There are these two breakaway provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and they were both under the "protection" of Russian peacekeeping forces, under a deal brokered by the EU.  So, you may not like that, but hey, it was our friends that said it was okay, and clearly these provinces do not want to be under Georgian rule anyway.  So, if you believe in the right of self-determination, then what the hell difference does it make?

But anyway, Georgia attacked, and I saw some guy, it was a YouTube comment, no way am I getting into arguments in the YouTube comments, but I saw a guy say that, "No, I was there, you have this wrong".  No, I was up late at night paying attention the night when the war broke out, and I know what happened.  It was Georgia that started that war, and the Americans lied.  Even to this day they lied and say that Russia attacked and invaded Georgia, and they lied all throughout the campaign. 

There was even a funny anecdote, where John McCain, Barrack Obama, and Tom Brokaw, the moderator at the debate, John McCain goes, "Yeah, and then Russia aggressively attacked Georgia for no reason", and then Barrack Obama looks at Tom Brokaw, and Tom Brokaw looks at Barrack Obama, and then they both kind of look at John McCain, and you can tell they had a conversation before the debate where they agreed that, "We're going to all go with the narrative that Russia started the war".  Barrack Obama's not going to challenge those facts, he's going to let McCain say that, and you can see Brokaw, "You're going to let him say that, right?  Okay, good".  Do you know what I mean?  You can just tell that they had rehearsed it, barely; not well, but they had!

Anyway, that November, The New York Times ran a story called, "Yeah, we admit it, we lied all along and Georgia did start it and antiwar.com was right, sorry not sorry".  I'm pretty sure that was the exact title of The New York Times.  It was definitely November 2008 when they admitted that they lied.  So what happened was, Georgia attached South Ossetia, and the first thing they did was kill Russian peacekeepers.  So, what do you think Putin's going to do?  Send his military in there to kick their arse, which is exactly what he did. 

By the way, he could have conquered all of Georgia at that time and reincorporated them into the Russian Federation.  He didn't do that.  All he did was he drove the Georgians out of South Ossetia, took another few miles of cushion, but uninhabited land essentially, but then I think he even pulled back after that.  And again, guaranteed their "independence", the protection of the South Ossetians, independent from Georgia, if not from Russia, in a direct reaction.

We have this from Ron Suskind, and I forget who the other journalist was now.  I need to look this up, so I can get both of my footnotes when I say this, because I keep having to say it was Ron Suskind, and I forget the other guy.  But there were two different reports that said that Dick Cheney said, "We should shoot missiles into the Roki Tunnel under the Caucasus Mountains and collapse the tunnel and kill the Russian soldiers coming under the mountains.  George Bush said, "All right, who agrees with Vice president Cheney that we should bomb the Russians?" and everybody's like, "Yeah, don't think so".  And Bush said, "Thanks a lot, Vice, onto the next subject", whatever it was.  By that time, he's got six months left in power.  By that time, he's over, he's not going to let Dick Cheney convince him to bomb the Russians. 

But that was the Vice President of the United States of America, who was willing to bomb the Russians in a war over South Ossetia, which most Americans, let's be honest, 99.99% of Americans have never heard of, which your audience has never heard of until I just said the words together.  South Ossetia; whoever heard of that?  A breakaway province of what we call "former Soviet Georgia", because otherwise you'll think we're talking about the state that's over there between Florida and South California.

Peter McCormack: I saw a tweet the other day where somebody was saying, "Georgia wants to join NATO", and this person replied and said, "They can't, Atlanta's part of the USA".

Scott Horton: Atlanta's part of the USA!  Of course they are, exactly right!  Hey, we can do a no-fly zone, which is a magic wish, where we just say, "Stop flying", and then they just stop flying.  Yeah, people are full of opinions without knowing much. 

So then, Obama comes in, and I'll phrase this this way.  The worst things, up until now, the recent invasion, the worst things that Putin has done is his support for the separatist side of the war in the Donbas in Ukraine and his support for the Assad regime in Syria.  But in both of those cases, it was all America's fault, 100%.  Even John Carey was secretly recorded, Obama's Secretary of State, is on tape admitting to some Syrian dissidents that, "Look, man, the only reason Putin intervened in Syria is because he didn't want a Daesh government in Damascus", that's the quote.  Daesh means Isis, that means the Islamic State caliphate. 

They were on their way to Damascus in alliance with Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra, at that time, to sack that capital city.  They'd severed the M4 highway between Damascus and Aleppo, and Assad calls Putin begging and crying, and Putin says, "Fine".  And finally, after America's been involved in this filthy, stinking, dirty war, suicide-bomber, head-chopper, mercenary war, for four and a half years, he finally intervenes to prevent the terrorists, I mean literal Osama Bin Laden-ites, from taking over the capital city of Damascus. 

Even The New York Times admitted, when they attacked Latakia, that they were driven back.  But if they had successfully seized Latakia, it would have been a genocide, they would have cut the heads off of all of the Druze and all of the Alawites.  Their slogan was, "Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave".  These are Bin Laden-ite, head-chopping terrorists, America's men.  Putin came to save the secular, fascist dictatorship from them.  In the scheme of things, it was the right thing to do.

Now, it's true that the Russian Air Force killed a bunch of civilians on the ground, and that's as regretful as hell; nobody regrets it more than me.  But it's 100% on Barrack Obama before it's even 1% on Vladimir Putin for that.  And when I say Barrack Obama, I also mean, first of all, the King Bin Salman, and then the son.  And I also mean Prince Zayed from UAE, and I mean Benjamin Netanyahu from Israel, and Recep Erdoğan from Turkey.  These are the bad guys in the Syrian war, it's their fault.

Iran and Hezbollah and Russia came to save a secular society from Bin Laden-ite, head-chopping, caliphate-creating terrorists, period.  A lot of sin happened.  Again, on the Iranian, Syrian, Hezbollah, Russian side, they committed a lot of sins.  But I'm just saying, the responsibility still is on the West and Israel and the GCC States.  They're the ones who did it, I wrote the book on it.

Now, on Ukraine, in 2013, Carl Gershman, the Head of the National Endowment for Democracy, writes in The Washington Post that, "Ukraine is the prize winner.  Take it away from Russia", and just like Zbigniew Brzezinski said, "This will weaken Russia.  They won't even be a regional power, they'll be nothing.  They'll definitely not be a world power.  Take away their warm water, pour it at Crimea at Sevastopol".  And he says, "And if Putin doesn't like it, he might find himself on the receiving end of one of these regime changes inside Russia soon himself".  That's in The Washington Post.

Then, I don't know if this is a trap.  It sort of seems like it, but then again, who knows how well these guys calibrate anything; it's central planning, right.  But Yanukovych, the same guy they overthrew in 2004, he won the election again in 2010.  So, he comes to make a deal with the EU, and the deal was essentially changed at the last minute.  They said, "If you're going to have a deal with the EU, you can't have a deal with Russia.  And, if you're going to have a deal with the EU, you have to raise your pension age by ten years", or something like this, "and just screw all your old people", and all of these austerity measures, "and you're going to have to take a $15 billion loan from the IMF", which just means gangsterisation, "we're stealing your wheat fields and giving them to Archer-Daniels-Midland Corporation, or Cargill", or whatever fascist thing.

So, Yanukovych, they say he was the pro-Russian guy; not really.  He was from, you could say, the Russian-leading party regions, but he was really trying hard to steer a neutralist course, he was trying to sign a deal with the EU.  Then he shows up with a deal and they changed the deal on him, and he had a funny joke.  He says, "I feel like a bride who just showed up at my wedding to be greeted with a prenuptial agreement, and now I'm not sure I'm in the mood anymore; I don't know if I want to marry you at all now", and he went home.  He didn't sign the deal and he went home.

This could have been like the Rambouillet Accords.  This is what I left out of Clinton.  Clinton bombed the Serbs in the Balkan Wars of 1994, 1995, but also in 1999, where he broke off Kosovo from Serbia, which was a very close ally of Russia, and he did it over Boris Yeltsin's bloated dead body basically when he did it, and that forever severed relations between NATO and Russia after that.  It was a huge deal, and they did it based on a lie that the Serbs had murdered 100,000 Kosovans or Albanians, which was just total Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction vapourware, never happened.  They sent the FBI to go look for the 100,000 bodies, they couldn't find them anywhere because they didn't exist.

Peter McCormack: I've never heard of the 100,000 number.  I've heard of the 8,000 Třebenice, but never the 100,000.

Scott Horton: Yeah, see Třebenice, that's during 1994, 1995.  This is Kosovo 1999, Clinton's victory lap after his acquittal in the Senate.  So, the excuse was just like Weapons of Mass Destruction, just totally made up.  This is a huge thing, I'm sorry I forgot that before.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've just never heard of it.

Scott Horton: The Serbs are very close allies with the Russians, so both of those interventions against the Serbs; they were our allies against the Nazis in World War II, the Serbs.  So, that was a huge part of that.

But anyway, in 2013, once he rejects the deal, then all the nationalists in the west of the country come out to protest, and they're paid millions of dollars.  For months they stay out there, from November, through December, January, and the end of February, they stay out there.  They're being fed, someone's cleaning their Porta Pottis, they're being entertained, they've got rock stars and they've got movies on big screens, they've got heaters, somebody's got kerosene heaters for everybody to stay warm.  It's a carnival out there.  This is all being paid for by American taxpayers and inflation victims, as our government pays for this whole thing, this whole circus leading up to the thing.

Then, this is where I referenced before, where we know Biden was in on it, was because two weeks before the coup, at the beginning of February 2014, the Russians presumably, it could have been, I guess, the Ukrainian Intelligence Services, intercept and leak and post on YouTube this phone call, you've all heard of it, the famous phone call, the "F the EU" phone call, from Victoria Nuland.  Now, if you watch CNN, the whole scandal was that she said a bad word, and that you're not allowed to use a bad word when you're a diplomat; that's not very diplomatic, is it, or ladylike.  And they're like, "Now, we'll go to a commercial" and that was the end of the scandal.

But why is she saying, "F the EU"?  She's saying, "F the EU", because the Germans are trying to compromise and keep Yanukovych in power, "That's not good enough, we want a coup, we want to get rid of this guy.  So, you know what, F the EU, we're getting this guy, our friend from the United Nations, Robert Serry, he's going to come in, and we're working with the guys in the Vice President's office, and we're going to midwife this thing, and we're going to glue this thing, and we're going to make it sail before the Russians can shoot it down".  That's the conversation between her and Geoffrey Pyatt.

She's saying, "Vitali Klitschko, the boxer, he's not ready to be in government.  We don't want him in the government, we want him to do public relations on the outside.  And we want Oleg Tyahnybok", put his name into Google Images.  There he is with his Hitler salute and his SS lightning bolts.  He's the founder of the Social Nationalist Party.  "We'll have Tyahnybok be Klitschko's handler and help him with his statements for his public relations, but Yats is the guy", Arseniy Yatsenyuk, "Yats is the guy with the experience and the connections to the IMF and all these things.  He's the one we want, and he'll be the Prime Minister".  And Geoffrey Pyatt says, "Yes, ma'am", and it's on. 

Two weeks later, mysterious snipers, which is shown now by multiple studies was a false flag attack.  It was the right-wing Nazi forces on the ground there, hired snipers, sent their guys to snipe people in the crowd, and they've proven that the shots did not come from buildings controlled by the government.  They came from the hotel that was controlled by the protesters and from the other building across the way, whatever.  And they essentially drove the crowd into a frenzy, and then the EU, working for the Americans, brokered this deal with Yanukovych, that he would have to agree to hold new elections, I think in March or May, I can't remember which, but he would have to hold elections very soon; and he would pull his police back, because they were accused of doing all the sniping.  He would have to pull his police back, but then they promised they would end the protest.

Well, he pulled his police back, agreed to the new elections, pulled his police back, and then the mob just took over and drove him out of power.  Then the new government that they installed immediately, the first thing they did was try to outlaw Russian as a second language, and then three former presidents signed a letter, an open letter, demanding that now is our chance to kick the Russians out of the Sevastopol Naval Base.  Except the Sevastopol Naval Base on the Crimean Peninsula had belonged to the Russian Black Sea Fleet since the days of Catherine the Great. 

The Russians had stolen, if you want to be mean about it, the Crimean Peninsula from the Turkic Tatars in 1783, the same year that Benjamin Franklin and John Adams signed the treaty with the British ending the Revolutionary War, four years before the US Constitution was ever even written.  That's how long the Russians owned the Crimean Peninsula.  Then, in 1954, after Stalin died, Khrushchev gave it to the Ukrainians, because he needed their support to take power in the Kremlin.  But it was still a super-majority, ethnically Russian area.

Now, after the end of the Soviet Union, when all of the Republics were set free, they made a deal that said, "Ukraine can keep the Crimean Peninsula, just let us keep our naval base there", and they've had votes and referendums over the years too about wanting to join with Russia, but we're always ignored.  But then, when the new coup junta took over and threatened to kick them out of the base, Putin said, "Nyet, forget it", and told his sailors and marines to go outside.  It's what the French call a coup de main, not a coup d'état.  A coup de main is one, swift, victorious battle, and end of the war, all at once.

In this case, there wasn't even a battle.  A total of six people were killed, it's not even clear any of them were killed by Russian soldiers or marines or sailors at all.  They just essentially went outside and stood on street corners, and there was absolutely the most minimal violence, and they just took over the area.  And they held a plebiscite and the people voted to join the Russian Federation.  Then the German polling firms came in and verified those numbers.  You had super-duper majority support for joining the Russian Federation at that time that Russia annexed it.

Now, is that pretty?  Is that according to the UN Charter?  Is that beautiful?  No.  Are we sad about the six people that died?  Yeah.  But it was a super-duper majority vote and it was an absolutely illegal as hell American-backed, Nazi street putsch, leading to this new illegal regime, threatening to kick them out of their most essential naval base, that led to their reaction.  So, it's kind of important, you know what I mean.

Oh, there was this massacre in Odessa, where the anti-regime protesters, who I guess were leftists, were protesting, and again the Nazis came and chased them into the Trade Union building, which they then set on fire and killed, I think, 15 of them or 14 of them, or whatever the hell the number was, I forget.  Less than 100, but it was still a pretty bloody massacre; I think it was 14, but it was still ugly as hell.  That really helped radicalise sentiment in the far east of Ukraine, in what's called the Donbas region; Donetsk and Luhansk.  They seized government buildings and said, "If you guys can seize government buildings and overthrow our democratically-elected President, then we can seize government buildings and refuse to respect your authority".

The new Kyiv Government immediately declared a war on terrorism and invaded the East, and killed more than 10,000 people in that first year, in 2014.  Their spy with The New York Times said, "The Russians never invaded".  Hell, if they invaded then, they wouldn't have needed to invade now.  They never did invade.  What they do is they send their Special Operations forces essentially to help these people hold Kyiv off, but they never sent their infantry or armour across.  And, they eventually signed the Minsk peace deals, Minsk-1 and Minsk-2, with the Germans and the French, to try to lead to an end to the fighting.

Now, Barrack Obama, first black President to do a Nazi coup d'état, was afraid to arm these guys, just as he was afraid to carpet-bomb Damascus and really see Isis take it over, you know what I mean.  He was pretty bad on Syria, but it could have been worse.  Well here, he did a Nazi coup, but then he was like, "Man, do I really want to arm a bunch of Nazis?" and he didn't, he refused to arm them.  He gave them trucks and training, blankets and stuff, but he wouldn't give them weapons.

Donald Trump comes in and they frame him for treason, and they pretend to believe that he is a suborn agent of the Kremlin.  It's not even that he's soft on Russia really, it's that he's a China hawk, and he wants to balance China against Russia.  And in fact, and I absolutely believe him on this, he said he talked to Henry Kissinger and he said, "Henry Kissinger, don't you think I'm smart that we should be friends with Russia, so we can use them to tilt against China?" and Henry Kissinger told him, "Yes, Donald Trump, you're brilliant.  That's what I think too". 

Kissinger was the guy that broke China off from Russia, used Russia to balance against China.  Well now, China's the powerful one.  So now we want to break Russia off from them and use them against China.  This isn't my point of view, this is what I'm saying is what Trump and Kissinger thought was right.  But the Democrats framed it up like the Russians stole the election for him, and they did this whole hoax of Russiagate, which you're so familiar with, but I'm sure you know that each and every single one of the 10,000 different accusations during that thing, all of them were lies, the whole thing was a hoax from the very beginning. 

The Democrats, the FBI and the CIA framed him up, simple as that, and that was what happened, and it worked.  Even though they weren't able to overthrow him, the FBI told CNN, "Well, if we can't overthrow him, we can at least reign him in and prevent him from having a more pro-Russian policy".  So, that was what they did and it worked.  The more they accused him of treason, the more Trump was determined to have a hawkish anti-Russia policy to prove what a traitor he wasn't.  And there's a quote from his son where he goes, "Let's see them call us traitors now", after they gave a bunch of weapons to Ukraine.

Now, this narrative gets fuzzy.  Supposedly, the Democrats, probably listening to your show, are tearing their hair out, because the way they remember it is, Donald Trump obstructed arms to Ukraine.  Yeah, arms again Obama was afraid to give them, and Donald Trump was more than happy to give them, their Nazi-infested armed forces over there.  He held up one of those deals for a couple of weeks, not that the Ukrainians even noticed.  He held up one of those deals for a couple of weeks; he was impeached for that.  The President of the United States was impeached by the House of Representatives for temporarily holding up an arms deal to Ukraine, because he wanted, again, to have their prosecutor investigate actual crimes and conflicts of interest and corruption, by the Vice President's son over there, which he had every right to do, as far as I'm concerned.  It's just unbelievable.

Then, he also tore up the INF Treaty, which was the treaty we talked about before, that kept the intermediate-range missiles, the medium-range missiles out of Europe since 1987.  So, our bombers, they don't have missiles.  Well, now they tore up that treaty and made it possible for them to instal medium-range missiles.  This is part of Putin's argument, and this was part of his demands before the war.  He was, "Look, I'm not going to invade, but here are my demands". 

His demands were, "We want it written into the Ukrainian Constitution that they're going to be neutral, they're not going to join NATO; we want you to stop arming them with all of these weapons against us; and, we want you to re-join the INF Treaty", which after all, the root of all evil, Donald Trump, only tore up a year and a half ago; why can't we just get back into that?  Same thing with the Open Skies Treaty.  That's the one where we allow unarmed planes to fly over each other's countries to do surveillance, to reassure each side that the other isn't mobilising for nuclear war, right, keep everybody cool.  Trump tore that one up too. 

As soon as Biden came into power, Vladimir Putin said, "Let's get back in the INF Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty", and Biden told him to go to hell.  And this is crazy old Donald Trump did it a year and a half ago, it was crazy when he tore these treaties up.  But now, I guess it would be crazy to get back in them?  And Putin, again, he's just saying to read his declarations of war from 21 February and 24 February, and yes he's angry as hell, but you read those things, they are much more substance than bluster.  He has this whole thing where he goes on and on about the flight times of the different kinds of American missiles if they were stationed at Kharkiv, and how bad of a threat that would be.  We're talking an eight-minute flight to Moscow, this kind of thing.  He said, "It's like a knife at our throat".

Then Biden goes, "He's just pretending to have security concerns.  He just wants to be Stalin and recreate the Soviet Union, and all this bluster", because they can't just admit that they were wrong, they can't just admit that the 25 years of the policy, that they were warned in the very beginning not to do for exactly this reason, because it would result in exactly this kind of conflict.  They just can't admit that those people were right, and that they were wrong to do what they did.

So now, you turn on the news and look, "War is evil and wrong".  The UN says, "At least 300-something people were killed as of yesterday, civilians".  The thing could end up devolving into general nuclear war.  I mean, this is the closest we've been to nuclear war with Russia since probably the 1960s, maybe the early 1980s, but we didn't have anything like this going on in the early 1980s.  There was a lot of brinkmanship, but this is probably the worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it's a crisis that's just been -- again, the Russians have played their part in the thing, but the Americans have just absolutely put them in the position to do this, and it's just so unnecessary.

Back to the provocation.  After the military build-up, why wouldn't Biden just send Blinken over there to say, "Fine.  We're not going to bring Ukraine into NATO anyway, so we'll put it in writing.  And we're not going to instal medium-range nuclear missiles in Ukraine, so we'll put that in writing.  We liked the INF Treaty, so we'll get back into it".  Tell me when I get to the crazy part that we should not give in and appease Hitler here by just giving him what is absolutely fair?  We wouldn't let Russia take Canada away from us.  We won't even let Canada be independent from us, much less run away with another military power.  Can't we just do a little bit of golden rule stuff here, a little bit of shoe on the other foot and see what it's like?  And this is the real problem. 

What we need is full regime change in America.  What we need is to not have Joe Biden or any of his people anywhere near power, or the Republicans either.  We need a whole new group of people who can get up there and just tell the truth and say, "Look, our last five presidents have been absolutely terrible, and the policies that they made have been terrible.  But it's a new day, I'm not married to those policies.  And I'm not sorry for them either, but we're fixing them now", that's all you've got to do.  But you'd have to have someone to say, "It's a little bit Joe Biden's fault, and we're willing to admit that".

Joe Biden is not America.  Let me tell you something, Joe Biden has never been America, he's just one senator, and a very bad one.  In fact, did you know this, the first thing Joe Biden did when he was elected in 1972 and sworn in in 1973?  The first thing he did was denounce Richard Nixon for his hasty and precipitous withdrawal from Vietnam.

Peter McCormack: I did not know that.

Scott Horton: So, screw him.  Just because Joe Biden does something, doesn't mean America did something.  And just because America does something, it doesn't mean it's moral and wonderful and Christlike and beyond reproach and unquestionable, and that's just childish.  They talk about all of this conflict and the way that it's played out, it's just taking place essentially in la-la land.  Again, I mean this, and you quote me correctly from my speech that I gave before, I'm not condoning what Putin has done here, I'm not saying what he has done is reasonable or justified.

Peter McCormack: But let's have some context.

Scott Horton: But I'm just saying, this is the truth of the situation that you need to understand.  And you know what?  This has essentially been my job my whole life, okay, but I'm not a partisan of David Koresh and I'm not a partisan of Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar al-Assad or the Ayatollah Khomeini any more than I'm an apologist for Vladimir Putin.  It's just that my government are the bad guys, you might have noticed that.  America is the world empire. 

Our government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, as Martin Luther King said, back in 1968, which was not true in 1968.  Mao Zedong had Johnson and Nixon beat by a mile, but still today, the United States is by far the greatest purveyor of violence, no question about it.  You look at the wars in the Middle East, and including Yemen genocide and Somali genocide going on, there's just no comparison whatsoever, and so that's why it's my job to tell you the truth. 

I'm still an Austin-ite, I'm still a Texan, I'm still an American, I'm still on the side of the American people, our country, our land, our society, out culture or whoever we are.  But that's why I'm anti-government, it always has been.  So, it's the same thing here.  I don't think anybody heard a hint of partisanship in there, because it just isn't there.  I'm only a partisan for what's right, the best I can tell.

Peter McCormack: All I know is, firstly Neil's going to have to listen through this and there are a lot of show notes to put together.

Scott Horton: I'm going to have to take the toll road home to get there in time for my next interview.

Peter McCormack: You've gone into so much depth and detail of things.  Firstly, it's super-impressive, but I just have to listen and have to go after this and listen back and start digging and checking, and I'm sure we're going to talk again if there's anything I think you might have got wrong or I disagree with.  I hesitate to use those words --

Scott Horton: Oh, that's okay.

Peter McCormack: -- but I will be saying, "I have some questions regarding this". 

Scott Horton: I'm happy to do a follow-up with you.  You live in town now?

Peter McCormack: No, I live in the UK.  We're just here to make a month of shows.

Scott Horton: Airbnb thing?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  We circle around the US, we try and do everything --

Scott Horton: Well, listen, I'm happy to do a follow-up with you if you've got some nitpicks, and I'm perfectly happy to hear them, and everybody, the speech, the video and the text, and I added to the text about support for the rebellion and the insurgency later, and all that, it's antiwar.com/scott, and libertarianinstitute.org/scott.

Peter McCormack: We will share all of that, I'll share the video out I watched, but I just need to go and digest this and read and just -- you're not the only one saying this, especially on the Asia wars and the Nazis and Najeed has been talking a lot about this.  I just need some time to read --

Scott Horton: That was one thing we didn't talk about, was Mujahadeen from the war in Syria for years have been going to fight side-by-side with the Nazis against the Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas.  I mean, no fooling, because they're Chechens, right.  So, the Chechens went to help the terrorist CIA side and the Bin Laden-ite side of the war in Syria, and then they're like, "Oh, you guys got a war where you guys are shooting Russians?  We want to come", so the Nazis are perfectly happy to make partnership with the jihadis. 

This is the side the Democrats have us on right now, man, Hitler's side and Osama bin Laden's side, at the same time.  And, even though that sounds like the kind of lie that they would tell about a guy like me, that's actually true about them, right in this moment.  Isn't that great?

Peter McCormack: I've got a lot of work to do on this one.  Scott, thank you.

Scott Horton: Thank you, man.

Peter McCormack: I feel like I've just had a personal seminar, and it's wonderful to hear.  As you know, I'm a big fan of your work and I've listened to a lot of your podcasts in the past.  And there's other things I want to talk to you about another time, but I'm going to take this away, digest this, and see what I make of it.  But thank you so much, I truly appreciate your time.

Scott Horton: Absolutely, thank you for having me.