This morning, President Biden huddled in the Situation Room
with his full national security team, and we expect to hear the
president, in just a few moments, announce a new round of
sweeping sanctions for what he calls the unprovoked and
unjustified attack on Ukraine. Russian military has begun a
brutal assault on the people of Ukraine without provocation,
without justification, without necessity.
This is a premeditated. Attack Ukrainian President
Vladimir Zelensky says history will be made at this summit.
Ukraine never wanted this war. It's a criminal and absolutely
unprovoked aggression of Russia, and the only one who wanted it
was Putin. Welcome to Keith Knight.
Don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute.
Today we'll be discussing provoked, how Washington started
the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine with
the author Scott Horton. Can you walk us through the
German unification deal with Secretary of State James Baker?
Sure. OK, so this is the fall of the
Soviet Union and from the time after World War 2 up until 1989
or the process beginning in 1989, the Soviet Union occupied
all of Eastern Europe, including all the way to halfway across
Germany. And when the Soviet Union
started falling apart in 1989, essentially people started
fleeing from Hungary into Austria, neutral Austria.
And the communist rule had always been, and they'll shoot
you for trying to escape. And that's real.
I mean, people could not escape outside the borders of the
Soviet Union. They'd be machine gun.
And but when they fled from Hungary into Austria in November
of 1989, the new or not that new, but the Soviet premier,
Gorbachev ordered his men to hold their fire and allow the
people to go ahead and go. And then that was it, man, like
a floodgate. I just saw a video the other day
of a guy kind of gently chipping away at a Beaver Dam until the
whole thing just completely, you know, fell apart 'cause you
know, it's going to flood or whatever you need to.
But that's the fall of the Soviet Union right there.
It's like chipping away, chipping away, chipping away.
But once that border was opened, oh, that was it.
And now you got people fleeing from east to West all over the
place and including you had this very strange situation that was
a remnant of the Second World War where the free half city of
West Berlin was holy inside East Germany, Kami East Germany.
And this is of course a major contention between the East and
the West during the Cold War and could have led to a nuclear war.
Fights over Berlin did get heated at different times.
And so this was the the big symbolic falling of the Berlin
Wall that the Soviets had built in 1961 between East and West to
keep people from fleeing from the Communist E into West
Berlin, and then from there catching a plane to the West
Germany and the rest of the West.
So the Berlin Wall came down and that began the process of the
entire dissolution of the USSR. Now part of that was the
question of what's going to happen to Germany now that the
Soviets are withdrawing. Now the Soviets still had troops
there and the question was, are they going to essentially accede
to the will of the German people and remove their troops?
And on the, you know, with the the deal already being the
reunification of Germany under W German rule after they leave and
they essentially negotiated a deal and the Americans has
essentially threatened Gorbachev that listen man, you don't want
to independent nuclear armed Germany that can do whatever it
wants after the last two wars over there.
So what would be better would be for you to withdraw your forces
from Germany. On a condition that America is
going to stay and Germany will remain part of NATO.
And that means America will be calling their shots.
And it means that they will have no need to obtain nuclear
weapons. We have nuclear weapons
stationed on their soil. They don't need nukes of their
own. Isn't that the future that you
want here for the medium term? And Gorbachev said, yeah, that
sounds smart. So in the negotiations, and this
is what you're getting at with your question, because it became
an important bone of contention, part of the question was So what
is going to become of the status of the NATO alliance, the
Western NATO alliance in the face of the disillusion of the
Warsaw Pact, or at least its. Retreat from Germany and
somewhat nonsensically, Baker had said.
Well, we'll bring Germany into what?
We'll reunify Germany, but we won't expand NATO.
Like the concept to the East, that doesn't really mean
anything if Germany's part of NATO and the East is being
reunified with the West under W German rule, the commie
government of the East is being completely dissolved and
replaced then. Of.
Course, NATO's what their war guarantee clearly extends to
Germany as well. So then they said, well, since
that doesn't make sense, what we'll do is we'll kind of revise
it and say that we won't put any military forces in East Germany.
And so that was what ended up going into the treaty.
But what's important is that it was when James Baker and the
German Foreign Minister, Hans Dietrich Genscher, and on on top
of that, then Deputy Director of the CIA, Robert Gates was also
communicating to them on the same day, February 9th, 1990,
that what we'll do is we'll not expand the NATO alliance, E not
one inch, as long as you withdraw and allow
reunification. And it was based on those
promises that Gorbachev agreed to allow reunification.
And in fact, they started to try to walk it back.
The Americans did and said, well, you know, we're going to
do this thing where we just promised not to put our military
forces in the east. We'll have the special military
zone. But of course, you know, NATO
will have a war guarantee. We'll still, you know, count in
the East and all that. Well, Genscher.
Did he knew that the Americans were revising their take?
And then he went and met Gorbachev one more time and
didn't say anything about that, said the deal from the other day
is still what we're talking about here.
And it was based on that. Because, see, it's not that the
United States is super sovereign over the Galaxy.
Germany also is a nation state and part of NATO.
And their foreign ministers promises also mean things, you
might think. And it was based on Genscher's
promise to Gorbachev that Gorbachev said, OK, fine, I'll
allow reunification. And then Genscher, now that was
just a spoken sentence that wasn't in a treaty.
He just agreed. And Genscher went right out and
gave a press conference and said, OK, he said that we can
reunify. We got full permission from
Gorbachev. Can't back down on that now.
And it was based on the promise it will not extend NATO one inch
E at the same time, all during this conversations, especially
the Germans. But the Americans have time too,
brought up by name Poland, Hungary, the Baltics, the Czech
Republic, and said, no, of course we can't extend there.
If we're not extending into eastern Germany, we certainly
aren't extending east of there. And then there, remember, in the
written treaty, they said, OK, but we promise not to move our
military forces into eastern Germany at the same time that
all this is going on. They're promising, as they said
repeatedly, that NATO is actually going to become a
political organization, sort of like the EU plus the United
States. And we're going to have an
entire new security structure for Europe that includes Russia.
And this was what they called the common European.
Home and Bush senior had said he I guess, was calling this the
New World Order, although he didn't really mean it, that it
would be from Vancouver to Vladivostok.
Would be one united security alliance of the North, or
actually, as they put it, not an alliance, but a partnership,
meaning that everybody works on all these security issues
together. And after all the Soviet Union's
gone, there's nothing to fight about anyway.
There's no one to fight with. And so we'll just have one
common security structure, including Russia, and it was
based on all these promises. That they allowed the
dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the freeing of the nations
of Eastern Europe which they could have fought for, as they
had in the Prague Spring and in Hungary and in in Poland,
crushing Solidarity in the early, early 1980s.
They had shown themselves willing to.
Crush local dissent against communist power during the Cold
War. It was based on all these
assurances by the West that they decided to withdraw.
And so even if it didn't say in a treaty, we promised never to
bring the Baltic states or Poland into NATO.
Still, you have to ask yourself, because it is in the treaty that
they promised not to move their military forces into eastern
Germany. Well, if they were always
welcome and free. To join to to bring Poland and
the Baltic states into the NATO alliance and deploy military
forces there, then what difference would it make if they
deploy military forces in eastern Germany, right?
So the promise in the treaty was a recognition of their earlier
promise, just slightly revising it.
And in fact, as I show in the book, in 1989, before any of
this, the first kind of warm up meeting before they inaugurated
this entire series of talks was Bush senior and Gorbachev at
Malta. And senior told him, listen, if
you allow all these countries to break away from the Warsaw Pact,
I promise we will not take advantage of that.
That was a solemn promise by the president of the United States.
And as his ambassador at the time told me on the show and has
written repeatedly, clearly that counts.
Expanding the NATO alliance is taking advantage of the
withdrawal of the Warsaw Pact, no matter how you slice it.
That was the first. Promise that was made was Bush
himself before Baker ever had a chance, and Gates and the rest
of them and as well as the British foreign minister heard
the German foreign minister, Genscher, etcetera.
And the French had had given a couple of promises along the
same lines as well. So these are all supposedly
equal partners in the NATO alliance, have just as much
right as each other to make solemn promises to a country
like Russia while they're negotiating things like this.
I mean, they work together on it obviously.
And they were agreed. But here's the thing.
They were lying. It's hard to find the scholars
who will admit that they were lying.
Only Joshua Shiffrinson that I've seen will write in a
journal with his professor glasses on.
That like hey. Man, they knew what they were
doing. The plan always was they were
going to expand the NATO alliance, and they made-up this
crap about expanding the Center for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, which became the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe. Isn't it Center?
I think so, yeah. The CSCE and they were, they
were promising that they were going to use the CSCE and then
later the Partnership for Peace. And these were why Russia didn't
have to worry about NATO expansion, because NATO is not
even going to be a military alliance anymore anyway.
It's going to be a. Political organization, it's
going to basically be an agreement between it states
that. They will not resolve their
border disputes with violence, that they will maintain regular
elections and civilian supremacy over their military and this
kind of stuff. They want to be friends with the
USA. They're going to have to do it
the American way. But nothing.
We're going to drop that whole military alliance thing.
And they knew that. They were just lying.
They were telling Gorbachev what he needed to hear for him to get
out of the way. And that was how this whole
odyssey starts, essentially, with the Americans playing
dishonestly at the end of the last Cold War.
So I believe it was either Gorbachev or Yeltsin who
publicly comes out and says Russia hereby withdrawals from
the Warsaw Pact and we are now, he didn't say this, but it's now
referred to as the unipolar moment.
What do we need to know about the unipolar moment and Dick
Cheney's defense strategy for the 1990s?
OK, so take yourself back to this situation.
Put yourself in Washington DC at this time.
It had been as I learned in school as a boy was a bipolar
world and that meant that there was Washington, Moscow and
everybody else and there was sort of a non aligned movement
in the third world. But essentially you were with,
if you for powerful nation states, they were more or less
aligned with Moscow or aligned with the US.
China flipped from 1:00 to the other right.
That was the way it is. So then, you know, China, it was
Nixon that that won China over in the early 1970s.
So when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1989, there's nobody
left to oppose the United States of America.
Now, if Ron Paul had his way and Secretary of State, you know,
President Paul and Secretary of State Pat Buchanan, what they
would have done is they would have brought all of our forces
home. And we said, listen.
And and this is absolutely Buchanan's line.
Ron was already a non interventionist anyway.
But Buchanan's line absolutely was.
OK, Well, that's that. We took care of them commies.
The commies are gone now. Let's come home.
He wrote a book called The Republic, Not an Empire.
And because, as he recognized as Garrett, Garrett said that one
must forbid the other or it will destroy the other you.
Cannot have it both ways, it's as simple as that.
And Pat said it's supposed to be a constitutional Republic, so we
should abandoned the Empire and come home.
The British and the Germans and the French and the Russians can
figure out their deal. They can do it without
communism. They can work it out.
China, Japan, Korea, they can work it out.
Hell. We can host a conference and
help them work it out, but let's bring our forces home.
We do not need to remain out there dominating the planet like
this. And then there was the War
Party. Which is just all the connected
special interests who said no, actually, in fact, look, some of
them were just ideological. Some of them had ulterior
motives like money or Israel. But a lot of them, I mean,
you've lived here your whole life, You know it.
People believe out here in the country too.
And in DC, America is Superman. And not just Superman, but
Christopher Reeve's Superman, right?
Like complete virginal, innocent Jesus figure that at a great
cost to itself goes around helping people.
You know, like that's it. You want us to stop doing that?
Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol wrote a piece for Foreign
Affairs called Toward a Neo Reaganite Foreign Policy in 1996
where they said that we need this policy of benevolent global
hegemony. And Robert Kagan said John
Quincy Adams said that America goes not abroad in search of
monsters to destroy. But why not We're the greatest
monster killer machine in the world, man.
That's exactly what we're supposed to do is go out there
and kill them bad guys. And but of course, as I'm
ruining the book for you now the Kagans are the bad guys and
building and this world empire and he's one of the major
co-authors of Iraq War 2 happens to be spouse is one of the major
ringleaders of American Eastern European.
Policy over the last decades, since the W Bush years, since
the Clinton years. She worked for Strobe.
Talbot in the Clinton years, you know, they wrecked everything in
the name of holding the world down and keeping everything from
getting out of control. And they do think that what
they're doing is right, most of them, A lot of.
Them, you know, have ulterior motives and like making money
and this and that. But you know, Charles
Krauthammer, for example, is a dyed in the wool
neoconservative, you know, Cold War Democrat turned Reaganite
type right for the Washington Post.
Just said he's the one who coined the phrase unipolar
moment in the foreign affairs. He's the one who said absolutely
unashamedly, I say we stop at nothing less than universal
domination. And then as later.
Paul Wolfowitz and really his men, Salmi Khalilzad and Scooter
Libby wrote in the defense planning guidance that they
wrote in 92 at the end of a rock War, One in preparation for, you
know, the the coming decade and the end of the Millennium or
the, yeah, the end of the Millennium dawn of the new one.
That America would remain the dominant force in the Middle
East, Europe and Asia and would allow no near peer competitor to
really even consider a challenge to us, to even build up enough
to try to challenge us not only any foreign power, but any
regional grouping of foreign powers.
China, Japan and Korea think that they can gang up on us.
We'll, we'll stop that too. Like that would ever happen.
But anyway, that was the point was America will be the middle
part of North America, will be the dominant force in the Middle
East, Europe and Asia from now on in order to prevent things
from getting too hairy out there.
And that's basically the deal, as Joe Biden says it, as they
all say it, as you've heard a million times, if not us, who?
If it wasn't us, it'd be China, which of course, is stupid,
right? China can't afford it and really
think about it. And Chairman XI has been looking
at George W Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
And you know, Joe Biden this era and saying, yeah, that's what
China should do is blow our own damn brains out, killing a few
million people around the world, making the world hate us and
accomplishing absolutely nothing for it.
But the Israel lobby take over our government, kill their
Shiite allies, our enemies for them.
Former allies. I mean, of course it's
ridiculous. No one else can afford it and we
can't afford it either. The national debt is, you know,
36 trillion. I, I was kicking myself right
after I published the book. Like the day I published it,
just a few hours later, I saw a new story.
No, it's not 35. It's kicked over to 36 trillion
now. Dope, man.
I just hit go on that thing. And so we can't afford it and
neither can anybody else afford to be the global Hedgeman.
But the idea is that this is the right thing to do.
And of course that they don't want to have to get real jobs.
And the military industrial complex is a very real thing.
In fact, nowadays they call it the defense industrial base.
And you're supposed to like it. It's one of the major selling
points. You can see all the think tanks
and focus groups and whoever they came up with this and
they've said it. So many of the major players
have said this about the war in Ukraine.
But that money's going to our congressional districts.
That money's going back to our home states.
Joe Biden have a quote of Joe Biden in the book.
Boy, these things are made in the USA.
We're getting the bombs from here and the artillery tubes
from there and the fighter jets from here and the tanks from
there. You know, citing American cities
and States and about, you know, essentially Keynesian economic
theory. But we're all the stimulus is in
the form of military spending. Which is just completely crazy
because none of it is good for distributing goods and services
to customers at all. All of it is just taking wealth
and destroying it, which is how you can have a former communist
society, former communist economy, but still, you know,
commie one party dictatorship in China in just 30 years have
these build these giant megalopolises that just put
American cities to shame in so many ways because our government
has blown, as I calculated in the book, approximately $17
trillion on militarism since the end of the cold.
War and that doesn't include the care and feeding of the veterans
and their families, which is other trillions and trillions.
On top of that, all that is money that got pissed away on
killing people when it should have been improving the standard
of living for the American people and helping us set an
example for the rest of the world of what freedom is really
supposed to look like. And.
As everyone listening to this is well aware, nobody stands by
Rock War 2 anymore. Remember when that was the
biggest deal in the whole world and it was so important that you
stood by it? And if your neighbor didn't,
you're supposed to call him a traitor In America hating Saddam
Hussein loving terrorist pinko kami homo traitor.
And yet now no one. Believes in a rock War 2 Do
they? No, 'cause we had to fight Iraq
War three against the consequences of Iraq War Two.
Since then, jeez, the whole Middle East is a wreck.
Iran and the Ayatollah and bin Laden won that war, right?
Even the Israelis didn't really make out.
They're getting a discount on Kurdish gas, but they also put
Iran's best friends in power in Baghdad.
That's not what they wanted. And so the whole thing has been
a complete disaster. Everybody knows that.
And there's no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt on
any of the rest of this policy either.
I got people on my Twitter going, no, Russia did the thing.
Yeah, Russia did the thing. But what do you think is the
context here? It's like saying, oh, my God,
Iran and Iraq are in a war right now.
I bet America has zero to do with that right.
It's not like the Iranians are fighting with an American built
military and Air Force and everything.
It's like Saddam Hussein is fighting on a green light and a
bag full of money from Jimmy Carter.
It's not like the revolution in Iran wasn't a direct consequence
of our coup 26 years before. It's not like the Iran Iraq war
had anything but to do with the United States of America.
No, but didn't you hear? Iraq attacked Iran?
Yeah, I know, dude. But also it was all because of
Ike Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter and their men and Nixon.
Same thing here. The American Empire inherited
the world, right? We got after World War 2, we
inherited all of the European empires, plus Japan's.
And then after the Cold War, we even got the Soviets empire in
Eastern Europe and working on it in Central and, and East Asia
and, and you know, far Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the,
in the Caucasus region. And all of this, as the Russians
say over and over again, you got to surround it.
I mean, you think about Poland, American bases in Poland, that's
not really surrounding Russia, but then you look and you go,
oh, I get it. You got troops in the Baltics
talking about bringing Ukraine into NATO.
Think about the map of Russia's western border.
It Ukraine sticks in there very far right, that Donbass used to
be part of Russia, that whole part.
And even then it wouldn't be a straight line down.
Harkiv is essentially what, 3-4 hundred miles due South of
Moscow? Or almost due South of Moscow.
And then we don't have bases in the caucuses, but building up
allies in the caucuses and terrorist groups and then of
course with our long time occupation of Afghanistan and
and then Korea and the Far East. Made real sense for them to say.
Made real sense, Keith, for them to say, hey man, we overthrew
the commies for you. We broke our empire up into
fifteen countries, and yet you still are just hell bent on
absolutely surrounding us. And how are we supposed to take
this as anything but a hostile threat?
And Putin pretended to not see it for a long time.
He would say, listen, we believe you that you love us to death
and mean us no harm. However, we can't just make our
policies based on promises. In fact, you're ringing our
nation with anti missile missiles.
So we have to build more missiles to overwhelm your
missiles because you guys understand the economics of
nuclear missiles. What am I supposed to do man?
And so here we are. In 1992, President Clinton is
elected. What are the provocations that
took place under President Clinton?
Well, the biggest thing is NATO expansion.
Secondly would be the shock therapy economic policy.
And then thirdly, the Balkan wars.
That's all the worst of it. You know, when NATO expansion
again, they were lying. They promised Yeltsin we're
going to do this partnership for peace instead of NATO expansion
and got his enthusiastic support and, you know, let that stand,
let other countries make their decisions based on the fact that
Russia's for it. Everything's cool.
And then including helping to convince Ukraine to give up the
Soviet nukes that had been left behind.
Not that they could have really made use of them anyway.
And then they go, ah, Psych. Nah, what we're really going to
do is the partnership of peace and all that.
We're just jerking you chain. What we're really going to do is
we're going to expand NATO and there's nothing you can do about
it, right? So what are you going to do
about it? And then that was it and.
Where did they expend NATO? To which countries under
Clinton? The first round was Poland,
Hungary and the Czech Republic, and but they let the others know
when they began the process of the membership action plans for
the Baltic States and guess the first of the Balkans or
whatever, maybe Romanian. Bulgaria.
No, I already said Romanian. No.
Romanian. Yeah, yeah.
But Bulgaria and then some of the other, I guess Balkan states
were brought in in the third round under W Bush.
And then see, it's funny because the same week that they finished
the inauguration of NATO expansion in the spring of 1999,
it's like maybe it was like 2 weeks later they launched the
aggressive war against Serbia to break off Kosovo in support of
no international law whatsoever. In fact, in defiance of every
bit of it with no UN resolution because the the Russians would
have vetoed it, obviously, and based on no authorization from
the US Congress whatsoever. Bill Clinton just launched a war
and. The whole time they're saying to
the Russians, look, we're expanding NATO, but it's a
purely defensive alliance, so don't be such a baby about it.
It's not that big of a deal. As soon as the ink is dry, they
launch a war and. As Doctor Paul warned at the
time, look at how they react to this.
In fact, right after Putin was, you know, took over power before
he was even elected, when Yeltsin handed it to him on New
Year's Eve, Ron Paul said, and you see what he did, first thing
he did was consolidate control of the over nuclear weapons back
under the control of the presidency.
And his government put out a statement saying that this is
their natural reaction to the launch of the war in Serbia and
proof that NATO is not just a defensive alliance.
And of course, then they went to Afghanistan in the name of
Article 5 in defending the United States.
But it wasn't the Taliban that attacked the United States.
That was a NATO mission that included, you know, virtually
all of the NATO countries and including some would be NATO
countries like Georgia for, you know, a good eleven years there,
eight years in Iraq War 2. I mean, I'm, I'm sorry, I'm, I'm
conflating Iraq War 2 Afghanistan for, for the whole
time from about, well, from like what, 2004?
I guess they really started bringing NATO in 2003 and four
and then through, you know, 21, the final defeat there.
And then of course, the aggressive war in Libya under
Barack Obama was another one showing that no, NATO in fact is
not a defensive alliance. It's an alliance.
It's America's military alliance.
But they'll do whatever they want and nobody can stop them.
And how do you like that? And of course, on Libya, they
did have AUN resolution. Not that I'm sitting here
simping for the UN, but I'm just saying that's the treaty that
everybody signed that said you're not.
Allowed to start a war unless you have aun resolution that
agrees, you know, the major power victors of World War 2
basically on the Security Council agree.
And they lied to the Russians and said, listen, we're just
doing a no fly zone over Benghazi because all of our
intelligence says that Gaddafi's going to kill every last man,
woman and child in that city, you know, 700,000 people or
something if we don't stop them, which is a ridiculous lie.
And the Russians said, OK, fine. And then as soon as they got
their UN resolution, they just escalated to full regime change
in Tripoli over a nine month air war, completely betraying the
new president Medvedev and humiliating him and leading
directly to Putin's return to the presidency in 2012 based on
his humiliating failure to veto that war.
So anyway, it's a little taste of, you know, what the NATO
alliance actually is compared to what they say on the shock
therapy. I mean, look, if it was you and
me, we would have sent Murray Rothbard and Lou Rockwell and
Ron Paul over there and. And they would have got it right
'cause they're our friends and we like them.
But what happened was George Bush and Bill Clinton sent
Harvard over there and they're capitalists, they're not
communists, they're not leftists, they're neo liberals.
They are center left. Free markets and democracy, as
Bill Clinton called it, meaning our current system, right, New
Deal, ISM, quasi free markets and quasi democracy and cronyism
and inflationary money and all of these things.
And so they sent those people over there.
So they were trying to do the right thing mostly, but they
just didn't know what they were doing.
And what they really needed was a strict rule of law protecting
property rights and contracts. And on top of that, they needed
fiscal restraint and hard money. And they got none of that.
And, you know, there are a lot of different guys involved, and
not all of it is any one of their faults or anything like
that. But essentially through
hyperinflation, through the voucher scam and the loans for
shares scam, they essentially turned the Russian economy
absolutely inside out. Now we're talking about a
communist economy. And I'm not like calling names.
I'm saying the national government in Moscow owned
everything, OK? It was literally a Marxist
Soviet commie union. You know, not just the political
flavor of it, but that was how the economy was run.
Everybody's a government employee.
All of the property is owned by the state, and so how were they
going to transfer from that to Rothbardian free market purity
and perfection? Well, it was going to be a hell
of a task, right? And they blew it.
Everybody involved blew it. And of course the Russians are
responsible for their part in it.
There's no point in playing down the Americans role 'cause they
accepted responsibility. For it, they bragged about it at
the time they were doing it and thought they were doing the
right thing and getting away with it.
And then they took responsibility for it after it
failed and said, boy, we really screwed that up.
So there's no point in saying that.
No, it was all the Russians fault, not the Americans.
The Americans, look, here's what I'm trying to say.
There was going to be some kind of deindustrialization, right?
The whole economy was a zombie economy.
A lot of those factories were going to not be able to survive.
In a free market context, right. So there was going to be some
level of deindustrialization, but what happened instead was
the absolute wholesale deal, deindustrialization of Russia,
the absolute hollowing out of the carcass of its economy so
that they just had virtually nothing to to build back up
from. They just the the gangsters who
are not businessmen. They didn't have any skills.
They didn't have any interest in building up the economy.
They essentially were taking property and then stripping it
and selling it off and selling, spending all the money on coke
and whores and expensive cars and having a good time
entertainment for themselves at the expense of the their own
society that they ruthlessly exploited.
And then those companies were all just driven into the ground
and this led to an excess death count of something like 5 to 6
million people. Something like would happen in
the absolute worst war time. A collapse in GDP equivalent or
worse than even when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union
in terms of percentage of gross domestic product.
It was a absolute catastrophe. And really there are a few
studies out there that I didn't really get a chance to delve
into this too, too much because it was just too far afield from
my book. Although I really, it is an
omission that I don't really cover how shock therapy took
place in Ukraine. I kind of allude to it a little
bit, but there are a bunch of studies out out there, JSTOR and
everything about how this is true kind of for all of commie
Eastern Europe. So after all, Western Europe was
in charge and they didn't want a bunch of competition.
They weren't acting in angelic public spiritedness of welcome
to the to the West, welcome to capitalism and free markets in
the new. World, they're just threatened
by cheaper labor. They're just threatened by, you
know, cheaper natural resources and cheaper labor in the East
undermining their stuff. So they all just want to be
protectionist. They don't want to help these
people up. They want to keep them down.
And the Americans too, and Jeffrey Sachs and many of these
guys concluded that the reason that they couldn't get the help
that they wanted for the Russians was because the
Americans preferred to weaken Russia.
They preferred to hurt them. And The thing is about it too,
and I know you're too young for this, but I'm sure you I know
you've heard of it, but I was raised on this man that and see,
they would never admit that it's all Woodrow Wilson's fault,
Keith and said that they don't blame Wilson, they blame the
Senate. They blame Henry Cabot Lodge and
the Senate for refusing to ratify the League of Nations
treaty. It's not Woodrow Wilson's fault
for getting us into World War One.
It's the Senate's fault for not ratifying the creation of the
League of Nations. Because if he had, then America
would have been the dominant power in Europe already and we
would have not let France and Britain inflict such harsh terms
on the Germans as written in the Versailles Treaty.
We need to soften that. And that would have not been
allowed to create the circumstances for the rise of
Nazi Germany because as John Maynard Keynes predicted in
advance and so many others predicted in advance that.
World War One was going to cause World War 2.
That, and especially that American intervention was going
to cause the next war 20 years from now.
And everybody knew it was just undeniable.
My 7th grade government school teacher said France and Britain,
it's true, France and Britain inflicted these absolutely
horrific terms on the Germans. I think they might have omitted
the blockade that they kept for more than a year after the war.
Maybe it was two years after the war.
It's horrific the way they treated Germany.
And so when the question is, how could the people of Germany, the
place where all that great stuff came from and whatever music and
art and culture and whatever, Christendom, how could they have
turned to Hitlerism? And the answer is if you that's
why, right? Like, that's why revenge.
And he promised to make up for what had happened to them at the
end of the war, to get their territories back, to give them
their dignity back after they've been completely screwed.
And so then, Keith America learned that lesson at the end
of World War 2. Again, I'm telling you my
elementary and junior high civics education here.
OK, this is. What we all?
Knew as a society as of late 20th century America OK post war
America was we're better and smarter than those stupid Brits
in French and instead of putting our heel on the German and
Japanese neck after the war. We helped them up and we rebuilt
them and we made them our friends.
Now they're our friends and that shows that why we should be the
stewards of the world instead of them because we're so much
better at it. And so those are the lessons of
Versailles. Don't do that to people, man.
You beat a guy, be a good sport about it or you're going to have
blowback, right? That's it.
So then what they do, the Bush administration and the Clinton
administration, that's Bush senior and Clinton, they said
that they go, we got to heed the lessons of Versailles and then
they didn't. They said we got to be
magnanimous about this. And then they weren't and they
exploited them and they rubbed their face in it.
And Jeffrey Sachs and the rest of these guys say it was
deliberate. And I have so many quotes
throughout the book of different people, especially in the
Clinton years, expressing the conventional wisdom that look at
the Russians don't like it. What are they going to do about
it? Does that sound like Christopher
Reeve's version, Boy Virgin, Boy Scout Superman to you?
What are they going to do about it?
No, that's bad guys talking. That's bad guys talking.
Well, come on, Russia's a pale shadow of what they were, and
they don't like it, and they react against what we do.
Well, we still got NATO. So if we pick a fight by
building up this alliance, at least we have our alliance to
fight with, to intimidate them with, to threaten them with.
Does that sound like a new world order, or that's just going back
to the 19th century? That's the Americans claiming
universalism and globalism and the rule of law when they're
doing nothing but act just like the damned British.
Yeah, there definitely seems to be a correlation between
countries that embrace more free markets and have a significant
increase in life expectancy, whether it's Britain, America,
Eastern Europe, Singapore, places in China, South Korea.
But that did not happen in Russia.
And when you read those quotes that you mentioned on top of it,
it certainly seemed like a deliberate plan to actively
weaken Russia. As the defense planning guidance
mentions, they can't tolerate a single competitor in the world
when it comes to. I skip this, but it's in the
book. I got a whole section on Bosnia.
Bush senior started it. Bill Clinton also made it worse
and is horrible, and so that's in there too.
And the case of Kosovo, is that the one where I actually don't?
I'm not as familiar with this as I should be when it comes to
Milosevic. Was the bad guy who Clinton was
stopping from engaging in genocide?
Was that in Kosovo? Well, that was what they
claimed, yeah, but it wasn't. True that that was the claim.
OK, when it comes. To.
Purely in a civil war. So they claimed by their
interpretation of the law, and I, I go through all of this, by
their interpretation of the law, Bosnia had every right to
secede. And so at that time, then at
that point, if Serbia, and this is debatable and whatever, but
if Serbia is fighting a war in Bosnia, they could at least sort
of pretend that that is a war between sovereigns, not a civil
war after the secession, which they recognized.
OK. But Kosovo was always part of
Serbia, and it was dominated by ethnic Albanians.
And there was a huge, you know, potential conflict there.
But America, the Americans and their allies, of course, made it
worse and worse and, you know, took the side of by far the
worst guys in the civil war and set again this precedent that
the president can just do whatever he wants.
You know, when Barack Obama started the war in Libya, he
just gave us a short statement. While he was on another on a
trip to Brazil, he didn't come home and sit down in the Oval
Office and go, my fellow Americans, here's why I just
started a war without Congress and do whatever I want.
He's just like giving a press conference like, oh, by the way,
I hereby start a war against Libya.
That was. The precedent set by Bill
Clinton in Kosovo that I can intervene in a civil war on no
authority from anyone anywhere whatsoever.
And nobody stopped him, nobody impeached him and removed him
from office for that. They had just finished
impeaching him over BS, so they had no political capital for
that. And the Congress was run by Newt
Gingrich and Trent Lott, who might as well have been Hillary
Clinton anyway, so. Yeah, it's amazing that the fact
that there's a civil war, they justify engaging in intervention
as though they don't constantly celebrate the civil war that
Americans had as the greatest triumph of good over evil in our
history, constantly saying, well, we had to intervene
against Bashar al-Assad in his civil war by the.
Way, you know when they started the war in Yemen again, Barack
Obama started that war with much less a declaration war and no
authorization from Congress whatsoever, and he didn't even
announce it. You know who announced America
started when America in 20 March 2015 when Barack Obama declared
war on Yemen? Bernadette Meehan, the
spokeswoman for the US State Department, issued a paper press
release. So by the way, the US is bombing
Yemen for the next 10 years. We're going to kill half a
million people minimum. When it comes to Bush Senior
expanding NATO into Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, we have more NATO expansion.
When it comes to the treaties, what other provocations, as far
as treaties go, did George Bush Junior get the US out of?
Well, the big one is the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, which
had been initially signed. I forget when it was ratified.
It had originally been negotiated and signed by Richard
Nixon. Instead we're limited to I think
two or three anti ballistic missile sites because as it says
right in the thing with an eye toward limiting the arms race.
You know, you can say it's perfectly fine to have a
defensive anti missile system, but you have to understand the
other side is just going to make more missiles and you can make
your anti missile systems more and more effective.
And then they can build even more missiles than that.
And we can keep going forever until it's, you know, like Itchy
and Scratchy with the two gigantic guns the size of the
planet Earth, you know, blowing each other away.
There's essentially no limit on it.
So they said let's put a limit on it.
Let's not attempt to build up the ability to shoot down each
other's incoming nukes so that we'll just stop making more and
more. At that point they already had
10s of thousands each, enough to kill the whole planet over and
over again. Life on the planet over and over
again and so well, So what? What do you think happened W
Bush tore up the treaty and the Russians started making more
missiles. Bush put he started this.
They only I just saw they just activated one of these Aegis
onshore systems in Poland the other day.
Dude, after all this time, God, what a boondock.
The whole thing is such a RIP off, Keith.
And then The thing is they put these Sparrow interceptor
missiles in Romania, Poland, and then the radars and the Czech
Republic, and they say this is to protect Europe.
Particularly Poland for some reason from Iran that doesn't
have missiles that can reach Central Europe and isn't making
them and doesn't have nuclear weapons and isn't making them.
And So what are we even talking about here?
It is completely unbelievable. When Bush said it.
I swear man I I I searched so high and low and I asked friends
to help me and I asked this stupid AI chat ball on my phone
to help me find. I could never find it but I
swear to God this is true. Dude, I remember this Bush was
at some G8 meeting or something and he goes, well, the missile
system's for Iran and the whole room busted up laughing because
it's just so stupid. What are you talking about?
I can never find that. Like I know somebody had blogged
about it at the time or something.
It had been, it was around back at the time, but link rot just
murdered it off the Internet. But I remember when it but when
Obama said it, they were all like, oh, yes, that sounds very
important that we shoot down Iranian missiles.
But then so here's the controversy, Keith.
OK, the Russians say, look, we're afraid that you're trying
to shoot down our missiles, which means we got to make more
missiles. And W Bush says don't be silly.
This is for Iran and it's proof of that.
Can't you see that we don't have enough anti missile missiles to
shoot down a salvo from Russia? You guys could nuke Europe off
the face of the Earth with thousands of bombs, certainly
high hundreds of bombs. We have nothing like the
capability to shoot all that down with these rockets.
OK. So that can't be what they're
for. So Putin and Lavrov, they go
well, huh. Actually, you know, that makes
sense. I think Medvedev had said this
as well. That's actually a compelling
argument. Mr. Bush said OK, but so then
maybe it's the fact that those are dual use launchers that can
fit Tomahawk cruise missiles that can be fitted right now
under the old treaty that Trump tore up, the INF Treaty.
We do not tip our Tomahawk missiles with H bombs, but we
can. And the Mark 41 is MK41 missile
launchers, Aegis onshore missile launchers that are used to hold
those Sparrow anti missile missiles.
Can also fit Tomahawk cruise missiles that have a very short
flight time to Moscow and pose a very credible threat.
And So what do they do? They immediately move their
nukes, or at least nuke capable missile systems into Kaliningrad
and into Belarus. Like, well, what are we going to
do? We got to target your missiles
with our missiles. Now the whole thing is a giant
escalation and it achieves nothing.
And George Bush, by tearing up that treaty, essentially, he
wasn't just. Helping to really, you know,
inflict a major wound in America's relationship with
Russia. He really was betraying all of
mankind with that. You know, that's treason against
just humanity itself. The enemy is the fusion bombs.
Not the Russians. It's our fusion bombs too.
That's the enemy. That who has, that's who has to
be kept at Bay forever, is atomic and thermonuclear
weapons. We cannot have these used, and
what Bush did was increase the likelihood of their use.
Period. Which makes him, well, tied for
worst person of, you know, since the Second World War at least.
I'm sure Barry Weiss would like to give him a run for his money
when it comes to NATO expansion in general.
What is the problem with NATO expansion?
OK, I'm sorry you've you've gotten into that.
You mentioned NATO is also an offensive alliance.
Who were the voices at the time saying NATO should not expand?
Just a bunch of hippies from Woodstock.
Who were the big voices saying look out, there are downsides to
expanding NATO? Well, first of all, our good.
Friends like Ron Paul, Ted Galen Carpenter, Pat Buchanan and all
these great libertarians and paleo conservatives were the our
friends and great on it. There were endless numbers of
liberals and leftists and progressives who knows how to
categorize them all. If I, I can probably like ask
somebody, maybe Gareth Porter could like give me a good list
of everybody who also was determined to not go this way.
But importantly for your point that you're getting to is that
2/3 the supermajority of the Council on Foreign Relations was
opposed to NATO expansion in the 90's.
The grayest of Gray beards. Not all of them, but many of
them. Including people like George
Kennan and even Brent Scowcroft, who was George Bush senior's
best friend and co-author is national, pardon me, is national
security advisor, co-author of his memoirs Together.
The guy that wrote in the Wall Street Journal in October of
2002, don't attack Saddam, which was a message from the father to
the boy in the Wall Street Journal.
That guy, you know, Bush seniors man, right?
He said we should not be doing this.
This is such a provocation. It's going to drive the Russians
nuts. They're going to react.
We're going to have a bad problem with this.
George Kennan, who had penned the so-called Long telegram.
And then the foreign affairs version is called On the Sources
of Soviet Conduct by X, which anybody can read from 1947 at
Foreign Affairs. And you can.
Read the long Telegram is easy to find as well.
And this defined the policy of containment during the Cold War.
He's the father of the Cold War and he said no, we should not be
doing this. We won.
These are the men who overthrew the communists for us.
Why are we going to rub their face?
In it. And look, man, I got a show in
there. Dwight Eisenhower's
granddaughter Susan wrote a letter and had it was a group
letter and it was signed by scores, man, like, I don't know,
50 or something. Admirals, generals, diplomats,
cold warriors saying, OK, we did it, we won.
Let's not be bad sports about this and ruin what we've
achieved. By turning our new Russian
friends into our enemies. By refusing to relinquish our
former policy. But as I'm sure you already
know, and as your audience would and could suspect, the worst of
the Rockefeller men, Kissinger and Brzezinski, the most
powerful of the CFR men, who were, you know, in this absurd,
it was Nelson Rockefeller's man. Kissinger is the foreign policy
guy for Nixon and Ford, and then Ford's replaced with Jimmy
Carter and and he's got David Rockefeller's man, Sabinia
Brzezinski. So it's all the same shit
anyway. So that's who.
These two guys are, and they said, and people can read all
about that in Barry Goldwater's memoirs with no apologies.
He's got a great chapter called Jimmy.
Who? What the hell is going on here?
With this anyway, once I get to talking about Gary Barry
Goldwater. So you said George Kennan, Pat
Buchanan, and 2/3 of the CFR. 2/3 of the CFR all kinds of all
and Susan Eisenhower and all. Kinds of generals and Admirals
and everyone but Burzynski and Kissinger led the charge.
And there were great many interested parties on the
intellectual level as well who wanted to do it.
But it was really the special interests that put them over the
top. It was the the military
industrial complex led by Lockheed Martin's Bruce Jackson
that created the Committee on NATO Expansion and in alliance
with the Democratic Party political consultants who said
this would be a great way to win Polish votes in Illinois and
Pennsylvania. And which was true that, you
know, a lot of these Eastern European countries wanted very
much to be brought under America's security umbrella to
protect them from Russia. And they have huge diaspora
populations here in the United States who immediately lobbied
for that. The Polish American lobby
especially was very influential and very well financed and
coordinated. They targeted the most important
Polish American businessmen and, and like essentially coerce them
to getting on board for the thing and all of this and really
use democracy against the rest of us in the country by by
pushing for the policy in that way and, and set us, you know,
under this path and. When?
But it's important, though, right, that it's not just Ron
Paul, because Ron Paul's right about everything, and nobody
ever listens to him. So it's almost like, I hate to
say this, but you understand what I mean in context.
It's beside the point what he said.
They weren't going to listen to him anyway.
But here you got Admiral. What's his name with the four
stars? Say no, man, what are we doing?
And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
What do you know about it? And it's like, man, you have the
whole Foreign service had 2/3 of the State Department and you had
the the embassy in Moscow saying don't do this.
Yeah, what the hell do they know about it, Right, Keith?
You know, so it did not have to be this way.
It's a fact. And the specific, you mention a
number of specific worst case scenarios that William Burns
said could happen if NATO expanded.
Who was William Burns and what did he say could happen if NATO
continues to expand? Yeah.
So he was the he he was stationed at the embassy in the
1990's, the American Embassy in in Moscow in the 1990s and then
in the W Bush years, he was the ambassador there.
And he's the guy that wrote the famous and yet means and yet
memo to Condoleezza Rice in February of 2008, warning her
not to give a membership action plan to Georgia and Ukraine.
And not only that, he wrote a follow up memo.
And this is all thanks to Julian Assange that we know this stuff.
You can find it all at wikileaks.org.
And he also talks about it in his memoirs and quotes himself
from an e-mail that he wrote to her, urging her that, listen, I
understand the political difficulty in the position that
you're in here and all the incentives and pressures on you
and stuff. But you really should not be
doing this. And he says, if you don't
understand what I'm saying, you might as well just stop reading
now. You know what I mean?
Like, you can see where he's, like, throwing up his hands.
Madam Secretary, please, I know that there's all this, like,
office politics inside the White House.
George Bush wants this done, and he's your president, right?
But you got to stop him. You can't do it, man.
We can't do it. He's our current CIA director.
He's a guy who had the responsibility of stopping this
war. And you know, Biden picked him
because he wasn't a career intelligence guy.
He's a career diplomat. He knows Russia best.
And But Biden's marching orders to him were not.
Stop this war, Bill, unfortunately, but he's the one
who knew better all along. And he again, another just great
example of how this could have gone the other way, You know, I
know it's different depending on, you know, what age you are.
I'm old enough now that when I was a kid in school and I was
learning about World War One, World War 2IN Korea, all that
stuff, and even Vietnam, but especially those 3.
It's all black and white pictures and it's all a long
time ago. And like the World War One
people, they'd all been dead by now anyway.
There are a few World War Two people left around, you know,
when I was young, but. This is all happened.
I wasn't born until 76, right? All this happened, you know,
World War 2 ended 30 years before I was born.
So like, whatever man, right? It's all inevitable.
That's the point. It happened.
What are you worried about There's?
There's nothing to argue about, there's nothing to consider.
Really. This is the history of things
that were decided. Whatever, right?
So I understand that. Well, that's how like Iraq War
One is going to feel or maybe even Iraq War 2 might feel to
people today. Some of this just feels like,
jeez, it was before I was interested.
It's before I knew about the Bosnia war, the Kosovo.
War. This is all this stuff that
happened back in the 1900s, right?
A long time ago, depending on your age.
And so it all sounds so very inevitable.
But again, this is George Bush's right hand man, Condoleezza
Rice's right hand man, William Burns telling her no, stop,
don't come back. And they didn't.
And why? Public choice theory.
You could have written the line yourself, Keith, I know you.
You know the economics of politics.
This was a. Legacy building operation for
George W Bush. Because it's big, get it?
It's big and it's bold and it's something.
And this is 2008. He's lame duck year.
He's done. It's an election between some
other guy and some other guy. He's on his way out.
He completely botched the absolutely unforced error of
Iraq War Two. He humiliated himself with his
public announcement that well, I guess it'll be for other
presidents to decide. How this war ends.
And, and the guy threw the shoe at his head when he went to try
to do his so-called victory tour in Baghdad.
He's humiliated. I don't know if the shoe was
before or after Bucharest, but anyway, this was to build Bush's
legacy. This wasn't about us, the
American people. It wasn't about Russia.
It wasn't about Ukraine or Georgia.
It was about George W Bush doing something important.
And again, of course, completely.
Botching it, getting it wrong and ruining everything for
everyone else. He's absolutely it.
Did Dick Cheney want George Bush to go to war with Russia in
2008? Am I remembering this correctly?
Yeah, afraid so. And I got a lot of multiple
sources on that too. This is when America's allies,
Shakashvili, who'd been installed in power in the Rose
Revolution, the fake coup color-coded revolution of 2003,
decided to launch a war to attempt to reabsorb the
breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, starting
with S Ossetia. The first thing he did was kill
Russian peacekeepers who were there under a deal brokered by
the EU and ratified by the UN Security Council, etcetera,
Perfectly legitimate presence. They're not some occupying army
or something. And first thing they did was,
and then they bombed apartment complexes, killed hundreds of
people in their attack on Tishkin Valley and which is the
capital of South Ossetia. And so the Russians came under
the tunnel. It's called the Roki tunnel R
OK. I Roki tunnel under the Caucasus
Mountains and came to push the Georgians back out again.
And when they were doing so, Dick Cheney and or his staff.
It's reported different ways and I bring you different footnotes
from the different claims here, but it was either Cheney or his
staff. We don't know.
I don't think we have names for who it might have been under him
who was saying this. If it was, we'll see.
Libby would have been gone by that point.
Maybe it was Victoria, Newland, I don't know.
But some say it was Cheney himself was proposing that
America launch missile strikes on the Rokie tunnel and collapse
the Rokie tunnel and kill the Russian soldiers coming through.
You know, like launch a cruise missile down the, you know, set
it off under the thing and blow him up and kill him.
And the way the anecdote, I believe Barton Gellman's version
of it, was that Bush said, OK, who agrees with Vice, so we have
to bomb the Russians. And then Hadley, who had been
known as Cheney's spy in the first term, apparently, he was
like Bush's bodyguard at that point.
And Hadley had already gone around and made sure that
everyone was going to keep their damn hand down when Cheney said
that or when Bush said that. And so nobody agreed and the
issue was allowed to go. But he's a heartbeat away and
not his heartbeat. Bush's heartbeat.
Cheney doesn't have a heartbeat and that guy could have been
very easily. Bush could have tripped and
fallen and broken his neck. He was dumb enough.
He could have hurt himself bad enough that Dick Cheney could
be. I don't know.
I never bought the choked on a pretzel thing.
I always thought that was like some weird like Freemason
ceremony where his dad punched him in the eye.
It was. Dad had been at the White House
the day before that. How weird.
The thing where they all have to get a black eye.
Like what is this? Weird little cult you guys are
in. Anyway.
I never bought that pretzel thing.
But anyway he could have. He is dumb enough he could have
choked on a Doctor Pepper to death and on a near beer and
then Cheney would have been the one to decide whether we fight
Russia or not over Georgia. And listen, here's how
unfamiliar and therefore completely, of course,
unimportant former Soviet Georgia is to the American
people. When you talk about it, you have
to call it former Soviet Georgia.
So people know that you're not talking about America's Georgia,
the one that we care about. And if you told people it's over
there between the black and the Caspian Sea, they'd be like, I
think I remember that from the last time I looked at a globe 25
years ago, the Caspian Sea. I've heard of that.
Isn't that in the middle of Asia somewhere?
Are you kidding me? Former Soviet Georgia.
And when the war broke out in 2008, there were anecdotes like
this. There were Americans who were
terrified because they know nothing about history.
They know nothing about geography.
They know nothing about context. They really thought, grown
adults really thought, and I'm not making fun of them.
I'm just saying like, whatever, I don't know.
It's true. People were really afraid that
the Russians were landing troops in our Georgia between Florida
and South Carolina, that they were killing our people, that we
were going to have to go to war with Russia.
And they were terrified out of their minds.
They're calling their families, trying to get a hold of people.
Is everyone OK? Because they can't imagine that.
What the hell? If there's another Georgia over
there in Central Asia, that probably belongs to Russia
anyway, right? Doesn't it?
And if the Russians are invading it, then what the hell do I can.
What does that have to do with me?
You say the Russians are invading Georgia.
You scare the hell out of me. I thought you were talking about
my friends live in Atlanta, dude.
Like what? Right.
And and so yes, Americans are unforgivably ignorant, OK, but
also the American empire was getting in trouble very far from
home. They had no right to intervene.
In fact, I did a debate with a neo con F level neo con named
Harvey Kushner at the University of Texas and he was talking
about how. You know, yeah, we got to.
No, America's not an empire. What's over there keeping the
world safe? Like, you know, recently, didn't
you hear about those Dang Ruskies invaded Georgia?
And I'm like, I'm telling the kids at A&M I'm like, Oh yeah,
no, America's not a world empire.
We just have a border dispute with Russia 7000 miles east of
Washington, DC in former Soviet Georgia in the Southern Caucasus
mountains that none of you college educated kids could
point out on a globe without labels.
So. But no, Harvey's right. the US
Navy is just there to help the world when there's an
earthquake, you know? President Obama in his book A
Promised Land mentions color revolutions in Kyrgyzstan,
Georgia, and Ukraine. When he talks about Ukraine, I
believe he's referring to the 2004 What are Color Revolutions?
Color revolutions are just coup d'etats.
American coup d'etats dressed up as popular uprisings and they
have to take place in these what the Americans call semi
democratic states. What would they know about semi
democratic states, Keith? I don't know, but it's got to be
a Democrat, a democracy enough that they have regular elections
to dispute because that's the template is hey, our exit polls
say that those. Ballot results are wrong and
everyone has to accept our exit polls instead of your ballot
results. You're definitely cheating and
we're not. And so.
That's usually what happens is it's when they lose an election
and refuse to accept it. And then with 10s or hundreds of
millions of dollars from the American National Endowment for
Democracy, International Republican Institute, National
Democratic Institute, and a great many different George
Soros funded think tanks, they camp out.
They refuse to give up and this is often in very poor countries
where this is absolutely the best job that you could have
would be being a professional protester outside.
And so that people flock to the capital city and essentially,
you know, riot, hold, hold protests and riot and force a
change in regime. And that was how they did it in
the Rose Revolution of 2003 and the Orange Revolution of 2004.
Really with the there. I have a whole list of them in
there. I mean, they did this in
Slovakia and even against their friend in Slovenia and in
Croatia. Wait, Slovenia?
No, in Croatia they overthrew their buddy Tuchman.
He was about to die. He died right before the
election anyway. But that was.
Bill Clinton betraying his own guy that he helped in the Bosnia
war and in Operation Storm and all that.
And then they overthrew Milosevic in 1999 or in 2000,
Yeah, in 2000. And and then, yeah, the Rose
revolution 2003, they did the orange revel in in Georgia, then
the Orange revolution in Ukraine in O 4:00.
And then in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, they did what was called the
Tulip revolution, or sometimes it was called the lemon
revolution. Pink and yellow were the colors.
And they overthrew a guy who had been friendly with them.
And it was, you know, one of the main reasons.
It's crazy, but I, I even quote Daniel Freed is the one
describing, you know, the, the Russia hawk is the one
describing this group, Hayat al Tahrir, this Islamist group in
Kyrgyzstan. And like these guys are bin
Ladenites. I mean, they claim to be
nonviolent, but they're actually not.
They've committed all these terrorist attacks.
Their propaganda justifies September 11th and all the stuff
that happened to us. And yet the Kiir government's
persecution of that group that was supported by George Soros
became one of the reasons one of the excuses for doing the coup
in the name of human rights. And this is in O5 and George
Bush had declared war against bin Ladenites from.
Who didn't even exist yet in Somalia they wouldn't be bin
ladenites in Somalia for another few years but he declared war
against Islamist insurgents from Somalia to the.
Philippines But in Kyrgyzstan, we're very concerned that the
government has been arresting these bin Ladenites lately that
are financed by the George Soros government there.
And then he had refused to allow America to station AWACS, Air
Force control planes there and had allowed the Russians to open
up reopen up an air base about 30 miles away from the American
air base there that was being used to service the failed
ultimately failed war in Afghanistan.
And so that was another one. They failed with the seat of
revolution in O5 in Lebanon. They also failed in 2009 with
the Green Revolution in Iran. And then there's like the
Umbrella Revolution, which I forget if that was under Obama
or Trump. The Ned tried to do that
umbrella stunt in Hong Kong, same kind of thing.
National Endowment for Democracy financing these groups
protesting to overthrow democratically elected
governments in the name of democracy, of course.
In 2014 there was a revolution with Amy Klobuchar.
I think Chris Murphy and John McCain were also there in 2014
in Ukraine. Can you walk us through what
happened in this coup slash Euromaidan revolution?
Yeah, essentially they say he's the Russian leaning presence.
It's not really true. He's from the Eastern Party,
Yanukovych, he's from the Eastern party, the Party of
Regions, and he wanted to join with the EU.
He ran on it. People say Paul Manafort was
Donald Trump's controller working for Vladimir Putin as a
damn lie. Manafort was, if anything, was
Ciai don't think he was, but he very well could have been.
He had a fit right in with them with his fancy cufflinks and all
that kind of deal. Like he's their social class of
the CIA. He absolutely was working at
least as a cooperative American type asset.
The entire premise of his employment with Yanukovych was
to move him W to get him to sign up with the EU and he wanted to.
And Manafort explains, people should really watch this.
It's a great interview of Manafort on Patrick Bette David.
And he explains how the Eastern oligarchs, the Don Bass
oligarchs. They hated the Russians because
they were always treated like the red headed stepchild and so
even though they were ethnic Russians and all of that, they
were sick. Of being used and abused and
having their companies seized from them and all this extremely
corrupt country Oh I hear by nationalize your corporation and
give it to my friend. This kind of just insanity.
And they said, well they can't do that if we join the EUEU
rules won't let them be that arbitrary.
And so it was people who in the cartoon would be pro Russian
actually wanted to join the. EU.
And that was who he was the agent of and and was doing their
bidding. But the EU played.
Way too hard of hardball, even according to George Soros, said
Angela Merkel ruined it because she was willing to give far too
little in loans and was demanding far too much in terms
of austerity and restrictions and social welfare payments.
To the poor and that kind of thing in order to get the deal
done. At the same time, the Russians
were playing hardball and we're saying, look, if you sign with
them, you're not going to be able to sign with us.
And Putin did publicly contradict that, but apparently
privately, numerous times he had also threatened that.
And so, caught between a rock and a hard place, Yanukovych
decided not to sign. It wasn't even a full deal.
It was just an association agreement with the European
Union on the path toward EU membership.
When he refused to sign, the Soros groups came out in the
street. I mean, the original guy that
called the Maidan was a guy from from Draki TV that was founded
with Soros money and was directly on the Soros payroll.
And he declared on Facebook, come on everybody, let's go to
the Maidan and do the Orange Revolution thing again.
And that was how it started. And then Yanukovych was a
horrible president and status. And just like virtually all
presidents do, sometimes this works.
I guess if you do it effectively enough it works, but often times
it only backfires. He clamped down with violence on
the protesters numerous times in ways that really only backfired
against him, including in January when the thing had
really just petered out. People were going home and the
groups, the NGO's, were running out of money and the thing.
Then, right as it's all falling apart, they passed what were
called the dictatorship laws is what the dissenters called them.
That essentially outlawed the kind of protest that you don't
need to outlaw right now. They're going home.
And then that just reinvigorated the whole damn thing again.
And all that. So that was, you know, very
clumsy policy on the part of the currently serving president
there. But then the whole thing
ultimately culminated in a violent St. push by the, to put
it very politely, the radical right in the street there on
February the 21st and 22nd of February 2014.
And they threatened to murder the president if he didn't leave
town. And he left town and they took
over the government buildings. And then the American government
immediately recognized the new coup d'etat junta.
They impeached the president with less than the supermajority
required and literally with Nazi thugs with guns standing around
inside the parliament monitoring them to make sure they vote
right. But they didn't have the votes
because they had already banned his party from showing up there.
So they didn't even have the quorum that they are.
I don't know if they have the quorum, but they didn't have the
numbers that they needed for the vote.
But they just impeached him anyway.
And then they immediately went to war.
And one of the the first consequence was the Russian
seizure of Crimea. And then very soon after the war
broke out in the Donbass. And that's the war that
ultimately we blew up into what we call the full scale invasion,
although that's not quite right. The Russians have actually not
engaged in a full scale mobilization.
If they did, it would look much worse and much different, but
what we call the full scale war, the much worse war since 2022.
And Jeffrey Sachs tells us to imagine if on January 6th, a
bunch of Chinese officials were standing in front of Trump
supporters saying, you know, you won this election, this is your
country, do what it takes to make things right.
And once you get that analogy, you go, well, this certainly
does seem like AUS coup that took place in Ukraine.
On page 319 you mentioned the 2015 Don Bass referendum.
I believe it was 2015. It might have been 2014.
What was the Don Bass referendum and who are the groups going to
war? Well, there was a referendum, so
this is after the war had already begun when well, it's a
com K timeline. So they, they, they do the coup
in at the end of February. That's cool.
When I close my eyes, there's all bright ring lights.
It's cool, the end of February 'cause you know, the thing
burning a hole in my retina with it, the end of February.
Then the the interim government takes over in March and 1st what
happens is the Russian sees Crimea.
Now if you listen to the war party tell the story or listen
to TV tell the story, they go, yeah, this whole thing started
when Russia sees Crimea. You know, the whole thing
started when the American side backed this violent push that
overthrew the government. And then as soon as they did
that, the new government moved to, or at least prominent.
The the former presidents all signed a thing.
And the I think the parliament had begun to move to repeal the
Harkeeth Pact that allowed the Russians to keep their Black Sea
Fleet at the city of Sevastopol in the naval port of Sevastopol
on the Crimean Peninsula. They said now it's time to kick
the Russians out of Crimea. This is their only 24, I mean,
pardon me, 52 week warm water port there.
All the rest of their ports freeze over in the winter time.
And this is their access to the Black Sea and therefore the
Mediterranean. As as Abedna Brzezinski put it,
John McCain tried to quote him that without Ukraine and crime,
especially Crimea, Russia is simply a EUR Asian power, a
regional power, but with Crimea and its access to the Med and
that makes them a global power and and a real power to mess
with. So it was, I don't know if the
Americans were behind this or not.
They're crazy if they wanted to push their luck this far.
And but the former presidents, Kravchuk, Kuchma and Yushchenko
all called for the Russians to be kicked out of Sevastopol.
And at that point, the Russians, they held sort of a bogus
referendum in Crimea that said, do you want to secede from
Ukraine and declare independence?
And then they changed it to do you want to join with Russia?
And they did they, I mean, I don't know if the exact numbers
were right, but they did have a super majority, solid super
majority support in Crimea for joining Russia.
And then this is the little green men that left their base,
the marines and, and I guess special operations forces that
essentially just left their base and marines and sailors who just
left their bases and went and stood on street corners and took
over the thing in a virtually bloodless coup. 4 people were
killed in a virtuously bloodless coup domain in the seizure of
Crimea. And it's important because you
got to put yourself in the mindset now.
The new coup d'etat junta in Kiev, Oh, oh, that backfired and
now we just got Dang, lost Crimea and now we got people in
the Donbass talking about they want to hold referendums and
they want to declare their independence OR at least, you
know, if not full independence, at least they're declaring
sovereignty and demanding hard federalism and self rule under
Ukrainian, you know, the overall Ukrainian state.
And so they overreacted like crazy.
And this was we know directly, I mean, it's widely reported at
the time, directly under the influence of the leader of
Jabhat Al Nusra from Syria, John Brennan, CIA Director John
Brennan, the traitor former communist turned bin Ladenite
supporter in the Syria war. He was the one who went to Kiev
and insisted that they launched this so-called counter terror
operation. Oh, al Qaeda in Syria.
No, we like those guys. Anyway, we need to launch a
counterterrorism operation against a bunch of people in the
Donbass who are refusing to accept the rule of the new coup
d'etat junta that America just installed in power, completely
illegitimately overthrowing a democratic leader.
And, and then that's what they did.
They just attacked them. And there is nothing that the
people of the East had done yet. That was an act of war.
They had seized some government buildings just like the people
in the West had done, including, you know, the intelligence
offices and stuff. And then here comes Kiev,
launching air strikes, bringing in tanks, calling in soldiers,
machine gun and people, and blasting with artillery.
Shells and and attacking them from the air and the people the
E say couldn't believe it they're like wait this is our
government attacking us who is that they couldn't they didn't
understand what was even happening that.
They weren't coming to roust out the bad guys.
They were coming to bomb the crap out of everyone and set an
example that this is what happens when you mess with us.
And I have a quote from Poroshenko, or was it Turchynev,
the first, the first president who launched the war, the
interim president who launched the war that no, I think this is
after Poroshenko was was brought in and escalated it.
It was the anti terror operation won't last years.
It will last days. You know, operation decisive
storm in Yemen, right, That lasted 10 years, right?
This is what we'll do. We're going to go in there and
we're going to whoop them good, he said.
And then just kicked off this horrific thing that, you know,
the the major peace deals brought the worst of the
fighting to the end in November and then in February of 2014 and
15. But those are the Minsk Minsk 2
peace deals. They were never fully.
Implemented and they led to a situation of essentially what
you'd call low level fighting, where I think it was
approximately another 4000 people were killed in the in the
time between the Minsk studio of February 15 and the actual
invasion of 2022. So this Don Bass war is between
the new state in Kiev and the people in eastern Ukraine who
voted heavily Yanukovych. Yes.
And then, as the war party says, and Russian troops, Russian
troops, Russian troops. But that was always overplayed.
It was a denial. It was like, it's like George W
Bush pretending that the entire insurgency in Iraq was all led
by Zarqawi. You know, like, well, that's not
exactly what's going on here. In fact, it was the locals
fighting with some assistance by special operations forces.
But the only major incursions by the Russians in the original war
were in August of 14 and in February of 15.
And and then that was it. You know, other than that, it
was like deniable volunteers, just like we have American
volunteers that go and fight on the Ukraine side who really
aren't necessarily sent by the Pentagon at all.
They just go and join. And any important information we
need to know about Minsk One or Minsk 2, looking at them in
hindsight? Yeah, I mean, the the basic deal
is, and this was agreed by the Germans and the French and the
Russians and the and the Ukrainians and then America,
Obama and the UN Security Council put their rubber stamp
on it. So these are the official peace
deals. That's first of all.
And they agreed to stop at the airstrikes, stop at the heavy
artillery and the kind of full scale war.
They drew a couple of lines and called it the Gray zone, kind of
a no man's land between the two, trying to keep the sides away
from each other. And then what was supposed to
happen was they're supposed to amend the constitution to grant
hard federalism, like real statehood almost to to the
Donbass oblasts, particularly Donetsk and Luhansk.
That's what they're called there.
Make up the Donbass. And then they were supposed to
hold elections and under international supervision.
And the key to understanding what happened is that Kiev, with
American support, refused to ever implement the damn thing.
They said we won't, we're changing the order of operations
here. Russia has to pull all their
troops out of the country, which mostly they were kind of
mythological anyway. It's like George Bush saying
we'll know that Saddam has disarmed when he brought all his
chemical weapons to us. You know what I mean?
We'll know the Russians have left when they all up and leave,
it's like, well, where are they? But they said and, and
importantly, and this is the part was the real rub, that they
had to give up full control of the eastern border to Ukraine
before they would hold elections.
And look, they have an argument that hey, we can't have a.
Fair election under foreign occupation, but Oh well tough
shit. You shouldn't have launched a
war against them then, and you shouldn't agreed to the deal
then because that's what the deal says.
Now they're altering the deal. Barack Obama and the Poroshenko
government, we never meant to sign on to it.
And they all have admitted this later, boasted about this.
That really was a ruse. Just give us time to rearm, just
like they accused the Russians of.
Give us time to call it time out and rearm and get ready for the
next phase of the war when it comes soon enough.
Because they knew that that was a poison pill and a deal killer.
The Russians are never going to give the Ukrainians full control
over the border before they ever even hold elections or implement
other parts of the deal. And.
But so, you know, it's funny to listen to them talk about, well,
it was a bad deal. Well, what?
Yeah, this is the rules based liberal world order.
The Americans and their friends can do whatever they want.
They can kill whoever they want. They can break any treaty they
want and tell any lie they want, steal any amount of money or any
property that they want and everybody else is the bad guy.
I'm going to do that next year on my taxes.
Keith, how come you didn't pay? It was such a bad deal.
I saw what the money was going towards in Gaza and I just
didn't want to chip in this year.
It was a very bad deal as far as by the 16th.
Amendment, Keith, you, you're responsible.
That's right, I shouldn't have done that.
I had too much to drink that day.
What were the provocations that took place under President
Trump? Oh well, he increased the
weapons and he refused to implement the peace deal
because, as you remember, he was absolutely under fire, gun to
his head. Essentially, he could not
normalize with Russia, the US permanent, an establishment just
would not allow it. And it's one of the things that
they absolutely threw them into a panic about him was that he
just wanted to get along and and he didn't know when to shut the
hell up about it. Dude, he was driving him crazy
with forgetting NATO, which look, because they're all
government employees, they don't understand a businessman making
a deal. And Trump is not the most subtle
type. But he's like Germany, hell,
they can fight their own wars. Well, he's just trying to sell
them American weapons, OK? That's all he's doing.
I need you guys to increase the amount of money you spend on
American weapons. My lobby contractor, you know,
donors, that's all. Increase your NATO spending,
that's all. But they hear him talk like
that, So they freaked. And then, of course, we know now
that Brennan was the one who framed the whole thing up in the
1st place. And then the Democrats got on
board and the FBI got on board for pretending to think that
Donald Trump was a Russian spy controlled by Manafort and Page.
And all this under the Russiagate hoax, which is is
really incredible. And I have a almost, you know, I
don't know, 7580 pages or so of the book is on Russiagate.
It's an incredible story about the framing of a major American
presidential party candidate for president and then the
president-elect and then president, or treason with the
Kremlin, of all things. This is the most unbelievable.
Thing, none of it was true. All of it was a lie, all of it
was a frame up job, but it severely hamstring hamstrung
Trump's policy and prevented him from making peace.
I remember when he went to Helsinki and he said.
Man, I don't even know of any real reason to believe that
Russia interfered in the election, much less collusion.
But like, what? Even interference?
I don't know, He said he didn't. I believe him.
Well, the guy's standing right there.
So like, maybe he's just being diplomatic.
I don't think so. But like, what's he supposed to
do? Be like, yeah, don't you ever
rig an election for me again, dude, Or some stupid thing he's
supposed to say to the guy right there.
So they all denounced this treason summit.
The. Treason Summit, I remember
joking on Twitter. I was like me a year ago or me a
year and a half ago. Boy, I wonder how the anti war
left is going to figure out how to come slinking back after
eight years of silence under Barack Obama.
Year and a half later, treason. Summit yeah there was no return
of the anti war left at all. They they were worse than Obama
himself by the time Trump was trying to get along with Russia
is amazing. What are what are the Russian
interference claims? Facebook ads and memes?
Yeah. And that that Manafort and Page
where his secret handlers telling him what to do.
And that Page had made a secret deal to get American sanctions
on Russia lifted and to abandon NATO and turn all of our allies
over to Russia's tender mercies and all these things in the
Steele dossier. They claim that the Russians
have been cultivating Trump as a spy for five years and planning
on installing him in power. They claim that this guy, George
Papadopoulos, had secret inside knowledge from the Russians,
from a Russian spy, that they had hacked the Democrats emails
and we're about to release them, which is a total hoax.
They claim that Mike Flynn had made a secret deal to lift
sanctions with the Russians, which is a damned lie.
They claim that Senator Jeff Sessions had, you know, done
anything nefarious and some secret implied negotiations or
agreements when he very briefly met with the Russian ambassador
under his duties as a senator, I mean, as part of the campaign.
And, you know, small little anecdote here.
Not that this is a million percent this positive, but dude.
If I told you that, yeah, Jeff Secret Jeff Sessions, Senator
Sessions had. Top secret, treasonous meeting
with the Russian ambassador in his Senate office in front of
his staff, who are all retired army officers.
Wouldn't you say that that sounds like a stupid lie and
that I should shut the hell up? Because of course that's a
stupid lie. How dare they say that?
They're accusing those army officers of treason too.
They're standing right there letting Sessions get away with
selling America out to the Russians.
Why aren't they being court martialed?
Like summoned back to duty and court martialed?
Because it's a lie, that's why. It's a damned lie.
All of it. All of it was lies.
Oh, Facebook ads rigging the election and every bit of it.
And that Trump was going to sell out our policy to them that he
was their Manchurian candidate. That they had done a successful
coup and had overthrown Hillary Clinton in a coup, in a
color-coded revolution, you could call it, and prevented
Hillary Clinton taking her rightful place on her throne and
all this. And that Trump then, was an
illegitimate president who had no right whatsoever to sign or
veto a law, or to order troops to come or go, or a single
thing. And it's just incredible.
It's just incredible. It's unbelievable.
And I, I, you know, my section on it is great, but I'd
encourage people to read the Durham report, which is not
complete. But it's the official
investigation into the investigation and where the
thing came from. And it is just an absolute
outrage. Dude.
You will not be friends with your Democrat friends anymore
when you read a dude, It's horrible.
It's just it's man. It's unreal that literally the,
the, the director of the FBI framing the president for
treason, the director of the CIA framing him outright, all their
staff, all of the top executives of the Justice Department and
FBI knowingly lying about the president of the United States
in that way, when they're all post constitutional, you know,
ad hoc agencies and departments that don't have any right to
exist. They have no legitimate
authority at all. You know, John McLaughlin, who
is the former acting director of the CIA, was asked, hey, man,
people say that there's a deep state overthrowing Trump.
And he goes, yeah, well, thank God for the deep state.
That's a good thing. Because let me tell you
something. The problem is not at justice,
and the problem is not at FBI and the problem is not at CIA.
The problem is not the NSA. The problem is at 1600
Pennsylvania, right? Except that that was a damned
lie. It was all a lie.
So Aaron the ergo. In fact, the problem was.
At. Langley at DOJ, at FBI, at NSA.
How dare they come at the elected president this way.
And I'll tell you, man, if the Republicans had done this to
Obama and Hillary over the reset, I'd be just as pissed
off. And I'd have written 100 pages
about that, too. This is absolutely unforgivable
what they did, and I'll tell you when you read my Russiagate
part, you're going to be mad. It is unreal what they did.
It's it's a hair to the left or the right, whichever you prefer.
I'm shooting the guy in the face in.
Dallas, I mean, it really is an absolute outrage what they did.
I remember my Democrat friends at the time were like, is it out
yet? Is Mueller's report out yet?
Refreshing their phones, just waiting.
I know it's going to be, well, we got him dead to rights.
We just have to put it in writing.
So the Mueller report came out and none of them ever mentioned
it again. What is in this Mueller report?
Is there anything interesting? No, the Mueller report saving
me. Turns out none of it was right
after all guys, sorry. And we did they did an an
obstruction of justice investigation.
Half the damn report is about Trump looking into whether there
are ways that he can stop the thing, but never doing anything
or making a phone call and asking somebody, would you
please intervene and hear from me and them say no, right?
And then. But there's no justice to
obstruct. And quite frankly, if he had
just arrested Comedy and Brennan and their families and exiled
them from the United States forever, along with the top 50
people at Justice, CIA and FBI, and banned their families from
ever coming back to North America again, that would have
been perfectly fine. That wouldn't have been
obstruction of justice at all. And they all deserve much worse
than I would like to say on your podcast today.
They are literally not in the absolute constitutional sense,
but in every other way they are the traitors to the American
people, to our constitutional. System and the rest.
Of course. Yeah, provoking war with a
nuclear power? Certainly more treasonous than
anything I could think of. I2 more questions.
Thank you so much for your time. How do you explain the videos we
saw at the beginning? We have President Biden and
President Zelensky saying this Russian attack is unprovoked.
Yet you have the nerve to title a big book like this provoked?
Are they lying? Are they engaged in a noble lie?
They know it's a lie, but you got to stop these evil Russians.
He's basically Vladimir Lenin who wants to reinstate the
Soviet Union. Are they just ignorant?
Have they not come across this material?
How do you explain so many people saying that this was an
unprovoked war? Well, yeah, first of all, from
the top, they're lying and they know they're lying.
I'm sure. Just like with the weapons of
mass destruction or Assad committing genocide or whatever,
there are unlimited numbers of idiots who believe lies and
repeat them and, you know, believe them and so are not
lying themselves but are just stupid.
So there's plenty of that. But I mean, in fact, as anyone
who was just reading the post in the Times or whatever at the
time could tell you, what was that issue was that Putin was
demanding that America sign a treaty promising that we would
never bring Ukraine into NATO or expand our military presence
into NATO. And he was also demanding that
they abide by earlier agreements and pull our military forces
back to Western Europe and so forth.
All that was negotiable. The real issue was permanent
neutrality for Ukraine and America and Ukraine agreeing not
to let Ukraine join the Western alliance.
And here's the real rub, and this is the real sin of this
thing, man, is that Joe Biden never had any intention of
bringing Ukraine into NATO. But that's not to say that Putin
was lying when he claimed to be concerned about that, because
what Biden did was he said, well, we're not going to bring
them in now. We're not going to bring them
in, you know, probably in the next few years.
I mean, they've got a lot of real bad problems with their
democracy and corruption and their economy and stuff.
And so like, you know, we're not really going to bring them in to
NATO, but what we are going to do is we're going to refuse to
ever promise that we'll never put it in writing.
And we will continue to increase interoperability, you know,
training and and production between our military and theirs.
We'll do everything we can to make their military essentially
a de facto asset of NATO in the West.
So that, for example, if Poland was invaded by Russia and the
NATO Article 5 treaty kicked in, Article 5 of the NATO treaty
kicked in, and America went and fielded forces in Poland to go
and fight the Russians, that we would essentially be able to
bring the Ukrainians in on our side because they would already
be NATO compatible. They would already have our
communications, our weapons, our standard size artillery rounds
and whatever. That's what they were working
toward was making Ukraine a de facto member of the alliance.
And what Putin was worried about, he said this explicitly
numerous times and it's perfectly, I'm not saying as
reasonable as what he did about it, but I'm saying his concerns
were perfectly reasonable was to say that, look, we think that
they're going to put these anti missile missiles like they're
putting in Romania and Poland, that we think they're going to
put them in Ukraine. And then they're going to
decrease their flight time from cruise missiles down to 10
minutes and hypersonic missiles less than 5 to our capital city.
And it is intolerable security breach and we won't stand for
it. It's as simple as that.
And and so, but the West had a doctrine that said, no, see, we
have an open door, just just just jargon doesn't mean
anything. There's no door.
It doesn't mean anything. This is a figure of speech.
Which means that only the West will say who can join our
alliance, and no other nation will ever have a say who's
allowed in our alliance no matter what.
Even if it's the Russians saying, listen man, this is our
Canada and we're just going to not let you do it.
It'll lead to war, we promise. Yet means yet if you do this,
there's going to be a problem. Right.
The Americans say we don't care, we rather have a problem then
say OK fine, and that's it. And so they essentially have
sacrificed the people and the nation of Ukraine on the altar
of their absolute ridiculous, stubborn bullshit, Keith, That's
it. And Ukraine is never going to be
a NATO member if they ever intended.
On bringing Ukraine into NATO, what is that?
That means that they intend to defend Ukraine.
Well, here's Ukraine getting bombed every day and they're not
defending them, are they? They're not pulling our Navy
into the Azov Gulf there or that the that Azov coast and bringing
our heavy guns to bear on Russian forces, are they?
They're not bringing in our B twos and B50 twos to carpet bomb
Russian forces and the Don Bass. Why?
Because then we'd all die in a thermonuclear war.
That's why. Because it would lead directly
to war between NATO and Russia and that would lead to general
nuclear war. And so no.
So in other words, Biden himself is saying, go ahead and take as
much of it as you want, Putin, go ahead.
We know you'll forever be able to prevent Ukraine into joining
our stupid alliance, but we're at least going to give them a
bunch of weapons and make it very costly for you.
That's it. And now they admit, which I
think is true, that they've known all along, just as we've
said all along, that Russia's going to keep the Donbass
Ukraine is not getting. They're not going back to 2013
borders, 1991 borders. Forget it, pal.
You can now read this. You can now in the fall of 24,
read this in the Washington in the Washington Post and the Wall
Street Journal and the New York Times that like, yeah, Well, OK,
yeah, OK. And then what do they say?
They go, They go. Well, that was always the plan.
We knew that we. Weren't going to be able to
force the Russians out of Ukraine.
Well, but wait a minute. What about two years ago when
you said, yeah, the goal is to push them out of every square
inch of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea?
Remember that? Remember this?
They say Russia has the second strongest army in the world.
Looks like they got the second strongest army in Ukraine.
Remember that. No, actually, in fact, Russia is
going to have as much of Ukraine as they want eventually.
And as I said, they have not even launched a full scale
mobilization and a real full scale.
War here. They're fighting with their
reserves here. They fought for a year.
They fought with prisoners working for the mercenary group
and saved all their soldiers in the rear.
People are like, oh, look how desperate the Russians are.
They're using the Wagner Group. They're using the Wagner Group
because of how desperate. They're not idiots.
They just tell themselves anything.
Bunch of damn Democrats don't know the first thing about it.
It's incredible to read Dwight Eisenhower's words talking about
how look, Soviets are bad and you know, I'm open to maybe
making peace with them, but we will go to war in Guatemala.
The Soviet troops and Soviet weaponry is not allowed in
Guatemala. America doesn't even share a
direct border with Guatemala, so imagine what do they share.
Ukraine and Russia have like 1200 miles or something
kilometers of a border together. So I we do not like statists
from any country, let alone Vladimir Putin.
But to say that this is just some bizarre attempt at world
takeover, I think it's completely ridiculous.
And look, let's do the the Canada Mexico analogy here real
quick, Keith. The Canada 1 is easier, I guess
here in a way. So we'll just start with that.
They're like, what if the Russians overthrew the
Government of Canada twice in 10 years when the people kept
voting wrong and then on the second one they used a bunch of
Nazis in the street to get away with the putch and.
Then the new. Regime immediately launched a
war against the people of Vancouver, BC who refused to
accept the rule of their new of their new coup junta that
overthrew their elected president.
And then they started threatening to kick us out of
our naval bases in Alaska, right?
America would invade Canada and probably nuke Moscow.
That's what would happen. America would.
Sack Ottawa. If America had to call up every
last reserve and policeman in America to sack Ottawa, they
would do it. If they had to conscript 10
million men to conquer Canada, they would stop at nothing to
prevent a hostile military power from controlling Canada.
You know it and I know it and your Mama knows it and everybody
knows it. That's a scientific fact.
OK, we would kill them. We would probably at least
threaten and probably just go ahead and follow through and
start a thermonuclear. War over it.
And by the way, you notice that when I say what if the Russians
did that, how completely inane and stupid and ridiculous it
sounds, it sounds like I'm this ridiculous one because you know,
and I know and your audience knows and everybody knows
Russia's not going to overthrow the government in Ottawa.
Russia wouldn't dare try to overthrow the government in
Ottawa. Are you kidding?
You know why? Because we nuke Moscow and they
know that it's stupid to even bring it up.
It sounds crazy, but we do that to them and it's perfectly fine.
The shoe? No, you're just not allowed to
put the shoe on the other foot. You're just not allowed to think
of it in that context. Then let me bring up the China
analogy as well, because this is one that is comes from Alexander
Solzhenitsyn. Talking about Ukraine and saying
what if he doesn't say exactly like this, but for our purposes,
what if when the American empire falls?
We don't just lose our dominance in Europe and Asia and the
Middle East. What if the East Coast loses
some of the western states right?
What if we lose not just right? Just like the Russia their their
Soviet empire. They didn't just lose the Warsaw
Pact states, they lost the republics too, right?
Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltics as well as Kazakhstan etcetera,
right? They've lost their so-called
republics as well. So OK, so now the Empire falls
and USA, Washington DC starts losing countries West of the
Mississippi River, states West of the Mississippi River as
well, and that they lose the Southwest and the Southwest then
falls under the dominance of Mexico.
And then Mexico comes in and starts persecuting the Anglos,
outlawing our Protestant churches, outlawing the English
language, confiscating our property, and mistreating all of
the whites of what's now New New Mexico in the American
Southwest. What would presumably still
Anglo controlled USA east of the Mississippi River do about that?
Well, they would invade Texas again and they wood forest the
Hispanics to stop mistreating the Anglos.
Or at least they threatened to. Or at least they back right wing
militias. Or at least you understand the
analogy here. They would not let that happen.
It's the same thing here. It's the same thing here.
People don't want to put the shoe on the other foot because
you know why? It means that they're political
heroes are. And devils and that they are
damn fools for loving them so much.
Sorry. It's so ridiculous.
They're like, you know what, we might need to stop people from
voluntarily downloading an app on their phone called TikTok
because there's 3° of separation from TikTok.
And the Chinese government, well, if that counts as a
violation of our sovereign independence, my gosh, what's
going on in other parts of the world, of course, certainly
qualifies as violations of the independent of other countries.
So I want to end on a somewhat optimistic note.
When it comes to peace talks in the past that have worked, so
many people say, well, you can't talk to Xi Jinping.
You can't talk to Vladimir Putin.
These guys are crazy dictators who want to take over the world.
What are some examples of peace talks in the past that have
worked out that can keep us optimistic about the future?
Well, America signed all kinds of treaties with the Soviets and
including did work with them on the dismantling of the Soviet
Union itself ultimately. And HW Bush, for all of his
horrible flaws, did push very hard for new treaties and
including made massive unilateral moves to disarm
America's thermonuclear missile force at the end of the Cold
War. And the Russians reciprocated.
And we went from about 40,000 nukes on our side and 70 or was
30 on our side and 40 on airs to about 7006 to 7000 total on each
side with only 1500 deployed and the rest in storage.
So this is a massive improvement over the the the previous state.
It's almost impossible to to explain what an improvement that
is over the the previous arms race.
So that's a huge one. And then, you know, the I'll
just look at, you know, Trump's potential almost success in
winning over North Korea in his last term.
The president of South Korea said, please let me go over
there and open up, man. I want to work with them and see
if we can get a peace treaty and end this war and all this.
And Trump goes, yeah, let's do it.
Well, I bet that'll piss off my national security advisor.
And so we told him to do it and it was working.
And then, of course, at Sheldon Adelson's insistence, Donald
Trump hired John Bolton. And John Bolton, who's, you
know, just for Israeli interests, I don't know what
Adelson cares about North Korea, but Bolton's horrible on it.
It's all Bolton's fault that North Korea has nuclear weapons
in the 1st place because of the actions he took working for Bush
and the State Department in 2002, which is I can get into,
but it's 100% his fault. You know, he shares equal,
Bolton shares 100% equal responsibility with George W
Bush and Kim Jong Illinois and Kim Jong Illinois's top nuclear
weapons scientists for the creation of that arsenal.
I mean, he might as well been a supervisor on the dam project.
And then he's the one who ruined the potential peace there.
But you saw what happened. Trump stuck his hand and I said
what the hell? Crossed over into North Korea?
Why not? And, and I mean, that's a war
that we've had a time out, a ceasefire, but no real Armistice
since 52 and and a real threat of conflict between those
countries this whole time. And then, you know, I don't
know, we, we negotiate our ways out of war, you know, and, and
negotiate the ends of wars all the time.
They all eventually come to an end.
We get Iran and Iraq fought for eight years, ended right where
they started from, only a lot more dead.
In this case, we have a situation where all reasonable
people in all places know that Russia's keeping the Donbass.
The question is, are they going to keep all of Zaprosia and
curse on or only part of them? Are they going to annex the city
of Harkiv or are they going to restrain themselves?
They're going to try to annex and go as far as Odessa or can
we call the thing off? Short of that, and those are the
questions. Only a damn liar and the damn
fool who believes them says that the Russians are ever leaving
the Donbass and and frankly I don't think they're going to
leave Zaprosier curse on either. That's their so-called land
bridge to Crimea. The last time they didn't
control it, the damn Kiev government dammed up the fresh
water supplies from the NEPA river through the canal to down
to Crimea. So they're just going to not let
that happen again? Keith, I don't know.
They shouldn't have let their government be run by a bunch of
American backed Nazis in the 1st place if they didn't want that
consequence. But they're losing formerly Novo
Rosia there, the four Eastern Oblasts, and maybe. 6 Maybe
Harkiv and Dipranaska, flop of flip, flam, jam, whatever you
call it there that nobody can pronounce because nobody cares
between the Don Bass and the river there.
I don't know, but you know, I'll tell you what, after Ukraine's
big success, they're faint in curse on and their massive
success in Harkiv and the very north of Luhansk in September of
2022, wiser Americans said you should negotiate right now.
You should negotiate now while you're only this far behind and
not worse, because this is the height of your power, man.
It's only downhill from here, including at that time.
And I know everybody hates them and they should for other
reasons, fine. But Miley, the chairman of Joint
Chiefs of Staff, was absolutely right about this.
His predecessor, Mullen, who had served under Obama, Admiral
Mullen said the same thing. Deal now, man, before it gets
worse. And that was two years ago, and
they should have dealt. They've done nothing but lose
men and land and wealth since then.
And it's only getting worse. And The thing is a catastrophe,
man. It's, it's a, it's a real
tragedy for those people. And I don't know what the what
the ultimate consequences will be, but I know that they'll
reverberate for the rest of our lifetimes for sure.
The book is provoked how Washington started the new Cold
War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine.
Thanks to everyone for watching Keith and I Don't Tread on
Anyone and the Libertarian Institute.
Scott Horton, thank you for your time.
Thank you, Keith. President Putin declared in the
autumn of 2021 and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted
NATO to sign to promise no more NATO enlargement.
That was what what he sent us and that was that that was a pre
condition for not invade Ukraine.
Of course we didn't sign that.