The Barbaric and Pointless Reality of the US Sanctions Regime. PLUS: Richard Medhurst on Assange Trial. And Russia Sanctions Specialist Prof. David Siegel
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Assange’s Last Chance (5:50)
Interview with Richard Medhurst (8:32)
U.S. Sanctions Regime (38:02)
Interview with Professor David Siegel (1:13:32)
Ending (1:43:42)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exactly exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, while virtually every American corporate media outlet devoted enormous amounts of attention and time this week to the death of a Russian dissident in a Russian prison.
Very few covered the hearing this week before the British High Court that would rule on the U.S.
request to extradite Julian Assange to stand trial on espionage charges in the United States where he faces life in prison or potentially even death.
They made this editorial decision despite the fact Or really because of the fact that the U.S.
attempt to extradite and imprison Assange is, as a consensus of press freedom and civil liberty groups have warned, the gravest threat to press freedoms in years.
As we examined on Monday night, American media love to denounce the bad act of foreign regimes while ignoring the similar or worst abuses of our own government.
Fortunately, there were some journalists who covered the Assange hearing in London.
Most were in independent media, and one of them, Richard Medhurst, who hosts a great YouTube program of independent reporting in his name.
He's been on our show before.
He will join us tonight to talk about everything that he witnessed at that hearing in London and what we can expect from the Assange case going forward.
Then, we spend a lot of time on this show covering the various prongs of the U.S.
machine of endless war.
Bombings and invasions and coups and financing multiple foreign militaries and wars and propping up friendly dictators and the like.
But one of the most significant arms of U.S.
war policy is also one of the most ignored.
That is the way in which the U.S.
government at any given moment is imposing sanctions on all sorts of other countries, typically with the stated objective that is virtually never served by those sanctions, and far more frequently have the opposite effect.
Namely, these sanctions suffocate the country and cause immense suffering for ordinary people who live there.
While strengthening the regimes that the U.S.
is ostensibly attempting to overthrow, you can look wherever tensions are found in Venezuela, in Cuba, in Syria, in Iran, in Russia, and the same pattern repeats itself.
Given what a central weapon the sanction regime is for U.S.
foreign policy, the U.S.
just announced a new round of sanctions this week for Russia in the wake of the Navalny death.
We think it would be really worthwhile to delve into the reality of this instrument, how it works and does not work, who it weakens and who it does not weaken, and the very real cost For Americans.
To help us with that examination, we will speak to a professor at St.
Joseph's University whose research focuses on state formation and transitions to capitalism within the states of the former Soviet Union.
He is David Siegel and he had an article in April of 2022 at the start of the war in Ukraine in the journal World Affairs entitled The Failure of U.S.
Sanctions on Russia that argued that the nature of the oligarchical class in Russia made it very unlikely that sanctions would change Russian behavior.
I think two years later, that article has been vindicated and we will talk to him about what it was that he saw, both about sanctions in Russia and sanctions more broadly.
Before we get to that show, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
One of the bizarre things with U.S.
corporate media is not always what they say, but sometimes the choices of coverage that they make and don't make.
And this week was probably one of the most notable in some times where our airwaves and our newspaper pages were filled with endless amounts of hand-wringing.
Over the fact that there was a Russian dissident who had been mistreated and imprisoned named Alexei Navalny, and he ended up dying in a Russian prison.
You would have thought this was the most significant event to happen in all of the 21st century, given the amount of endless coverage of American media that it generated, just constant denunciations of the state of civil liberties in Russia by American journalists.
Obviously there are a lot of countries in the world that have very poor civil liberties, including many of our closest allies, including countries and regimes in Cairo and Egypt and in Saudi Arabia.
We're not a country that only aligns with democratic countries.
So the question of why we're so concerned about civil liberties in Russia is one question, but I think the bigger question is why we're so unconcerned about the nature of these fundamental freedoms here at home.
One way that we would express that concern is by paying a lot of attention to the case of Julian Assange.
I think pretty clearly the most consequential and pioneering journalist of our generation who faces life imprisonment and I would say almost certain death If he is extradited here to the United States, this week he had his final judicial appeal in the British judiciary, which thus far after one ruling in his favor at the very initial stage,
a judge who rejected all of his substantive arguments about why this prosecution a judge who rejected all of his substantive arguments about why this prosecution by the United States is without merit, why it's a political crime, but at least accepted his argument that he couldn't safely be transferred to an American prison where he would not withstand the rigors of Every step after that, he has lost.
The courts have overruled that initial ruling in his favor, have upheld the extradition request.
This was his last chance, at least within the British judiciary, to try and resist extradition.
And although our corporate media didn't cover it, there were some of the best journalists in independent media who spent the week in London covering it with press credentials.
And one of them, Richard Medhurst, who is the host of a great YouTube show that reports on all sorts of foreign policy and other news events around the world.
We've had him on our show before, so you're probably familiar with him.
And if you're not, you should definitely begin watching his show.
It is extremely informative.
He joins us tonight to talk about everything that he witnessed and what we can expect Next.
Richard, thank you so much for taking the time.
It's always great to see you.
Hi, Glenn.
I can't hear you for some reason.
The audio cut out, but... Yeah, can you hear me now?
We're having issues with his audio, evidently.
Are you hearing me now?
Okay, actually, I'm glad that you can hear me.
Unfortunately, I can't hear you.
Can you go ahead and talk?
Yeah.
Can you hear me all right now?
Yes.
I think it's all actually the audio networks on both sides, which is pretty fundamental to a conversation.
So I'm happy we've been able to get that worked out.
All I did was say, welcome.
I'm sure you were going to say, great.
It's nice to see you.
It's great to be with you.
So let me skip that part and go to my first question.
Which is, as a lawyer, you know, I oftentimes would participate in a hearing and in an argument before a court and a lot of times you would get a pretty clear sense of where the judges were likely to rule based on the comments they were making, the way they were treating particular arguments and certain lawyers.
Having been able to witness that hearing, was there a lot of expression of doubt or skepticism or support?
By the judges who are going to rule in favor of one side or the other, were you able to develop an expectation about how you think this court would rule?
Well, it is good to see you, Glenn, and thanks for having me.
What surprised me this time about the judges is that usually in these hearings with Assange, they would really make known, you know, they would make it their mission to indicate the contempt for him.
I think during the first bail violation hearing where they, you know, sent him to Belmarsh for 52 weeks, they called him a narcissist.
And then during the actual extradition case, you know, they would either say nothing, like express no interest, or they would say something like, you know, trivial and then say silent for four days.
This time they were actually asking questions and asking the right questions, which surprised me, honestly, because if you look at their backgrounds, and I can get into that afterwards, you would think they really would be against them, as all the judges are.
So one of the questions that they asked, for example, was like the names of these informants in the leaks, because they were, you know, the US are basically arguing that WikiLeaks and Assange harmed informants, even though, you know, the U.S.
military said themselves it's not true.
So one of the judges, her name is Sharp, she asked Assange's lawyers, like, the names of these people in the documents, in the disclosures.
Are they the same ones that committed all these war crimes?
You know, the torture, the rendition, the killings, the helicopter machine gunning?
And the answer is like, yeah, not every single one of them, but they all participated in this war machine.
Another question that they asked, for example... In other words, just stop there, because it's such an important point, just to make sure that there's clarity on this.
The examples that the government was pointing to of names that appeared in the documents and reporting that WikiLeaks published were actual names of the people who performed the acts that were the war crimes that WikiLeaks was reporting on.
That's not in every case, but at least some of them, even the British government conceded some of the examples they pointed to were the people who were the subject of the reporting.
Is that essentially the case?
Yeah, I mean, again, it's not every single name, but the point here is that what Assange published had to be published because, you know, the risk to informants does not outweigh the public's right to know and the explosive nature of the materials.
It just doesn't.
And they were telling them, like, if you can deny us this application to make an appeal hearing at the High Court, but when we go to the European Court of Human Rights, because the UK is a founding member of the European Council, so that's an option.
When we go there, they're going to side with us, because they're going to look at what happened here, what did Assange and WikiLeaks publish, and they're going to say this counts more.
You know, these videos of war crimes count way more than whatever you're going to attribute to, you know, informants.
And that's what the US lawyers were saying, that, you know, informants in Syria and China and Iraq and Afghanistan.
I mean, again, if you go back to Chelsea Manning's court-martial, the DOD themselves are saying they couldn't find a single case of this.
You know, another question that the judges ask, for example, is the death penalty, because the issue with extraditing Assange is not just that he will be put in oppressive conditions, which is the reason the whole extradition was blocked in the first place, but there's the rule of specialty, right?
So how do you know the United States are not going to add other charges on top of this?
Let's just explain that.
Under the law of pretty much every European country, which opposes the death penalty, if there's a chance that the person whose extradition is being sought will face the death penalty under the law, the government is essentially legally barred from extraditing that person.
Is that basically the case?
Yeah, that's absolutely correct.
And this goes to the second main part of Assange's appeal, which is directed at the Home Secretary, because they have the final say on extraditions.
And they were basically saying that you cannot send someone to the United States or any country Knowing that there is a risk they could be sentenced to death.
It's just, it's illegal.
You cannot do that.
And, you know, the judges were seeking clarification from the US lawyers.
They were saying, like, can you actually, you know, is there any guarantee that he won't be sentenced to death?
And even the US lawyers were saying, no, there isn't really a guarantee.
They were basically admitting that, yeah, there's a likelihood that he could be given the death penalty.
The U.S.
could say, you know, these are capital offenses and then sentence him to death.
And I should also just point out that even if you give Assange, let's say, 30 years in prison, he's 50 now.
It's akin to a death sentence.
And the prison they want to send him to, ADX Colorado, is a supermax prison.
You know, the former warden said, once you go in, you never see the sun again.
It's a hellhole.
You know, and so it was interesting seeing the high court justices ask these questions because typically a lot of these judges, they have ties to MI6, they have ties to the British establishment.
And, you know, they basically hate people like Assange because Assange really put the spotlight on the U.S.
and U.K.
war machine.
And, you know, they don't like anything that actually democratizes or actually does journalism.
So that was really surprising to see from the high court justices, that they were actually interested and they asked these specific questions.
Yeah, you know, when I was doing the Snowden reporting, I was involved with almost every country in Europe where we were doing specific reporting, but obviously the UK was the country with which we were most involved, after the United States, in part because I was at the British Guardian, but I had the case where the British government detained my husband, and Also invaded the Guardian newsroom and I had lost all faith in the British judiciary.
I think it was probably the country with the most authoritarian culture in terms of condemning the idea that journalists should ever report on anything that the government has decreed ought to be a secret.
And so I certainly don't have very much expectation in the independence of the British judiciary.
And it's, I think, encouraging to hear you say that, although you're not predicting the outcome, it sounds like they were at least Trying to be more dignified in recognizing that there are some really serious problems with this extradition request in a way that you didn't expect.
Let me ask you, you alluded to this appeal that Assange by legal right would have where even if he loses in what is essentially, let's effectively just describe it as shorthand, kind of like the British Supreme Court.
It's the highest and last appeal that he would have within the British judiciary.
But he would then have an appeal to European courts because Britain, even though they left the EU, is still subject to these conventions and treaties that guarantee a whole bunch of rights that Assange is claiming are violated.
But as a practical matter, if the British High Court rejects Assange's argument and approves the U.S.
extradition request.
You have a government that has made very clear they despise Assange, a Tory government.
The Home Secretary just is a new Home Secretary, but still, I presume, has a lot of hostility toward Assange and a lot of loyalty to the United States.
Is there a possibility that they could act very, very quickly, in other words, wait for this hearing and before Assange can even file his appeal, take him and put him on a plane and send him to the United States?
Yeah, I mean, everything you said is so true about the culture in the UK.
And just as a quick note, they didn't even want people to report on this case.
And it's been, you know, the entire time because they want it to be like a secret trial.
But yeah, so under the European Convention on Human Rights, they can issue an order 39, which could basically stay the extradition.
So that basically they could not just put Assange on a plane and then send him to the United States.
So the thing is that today you don't know, and especially with this case, you don't actually know if the British government are going to comply with that because there's a probability, albeit a small one, that they could just say, screw it.
We do have these obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, but we're just going to send him anyway.
That possibility still exists.
You know, we shouldn't underestimate for one second, you know, how brutal and how thuggish the security state can be.
And you mentioned the time when they harassed your husband as well.
This culture hasn't disappeared.
It's still there.
It's absolutely there.
So legally, there is a way to stop the execution, excuse me, the extradition for the time being.
But, you know, when you look at the rights that are being violated, I just want to remind people these are not like European laws or something.
They're enshrined in UK law under the Human Rights Act.
So it's not like, you know, something optional.
The United Kingdom has to respect Julian's rights, and almost every single one of them is being violated.
It's truly incredible.
If you look at Article 5 under the European Convention on Human Rights, You know, the fact that you can't just arbitrarily put someone in jail.
That is what's happening, because this is a political offense.
You know, treason, espionage, these things are classical political offenses.
So that's a violation of the extradition treaty.
It's a violation of Article 5.
If you look at Article 6, the CIA spied on Assange.
They spied on his conversations with his lawyers.
How can you, you know, spy on someone's privileged conversations with their lawyers and then say that they're getting a fair trial?
Any case in the world would be thrown out, you know, no matter who we're talking about or what we're talking about.
And the fact that if he goes to the U.S., he'll be, you know, given a jury of CIA employees.
Yeah, in Northern Virginia.
In Northern Virginia, that's where they are.
And his conviction, just anyone tried under the Espionage Act, which is a very repressive law designed to guarantee convictions, automatically is almost condemned to guilt no matter what.
And then you put someone like Julian Assange in a place where there's military contractors and CIA operatives and pretty much nothing else but that in Northern Virginia.
And that's the reason they put them there, because they're beyond pro-national security judges.
They are just agents of the U.S. security state.
You a couple of times mentioned when you went to say extradition, you instead said execution.
And in a way, it's kind of misspeaking.
But I think in a bigger way, it's actually not, because there's obviously a great deal of concern about Julian Assange's physical and mental condition.
The last time I saw him was in 2017 or 2018 shortly before he was taken out of the embassy by the British police when Ecuador was Coerced and bullied by Mike Pompeo to withdraw their asylum that allowed the British police to go in.
And this is before he went into Belmarsh Prison.
And just to give people a sense, Belmarsh Prison is not a joke.
The BBC has called it the British Guantanamo.
It's a high security prison.
It's the place where terrorist suspects and people like that are put.
He's done now five years of hard time.
And when I saw him still in the embassy, he was looking You know, just very fragile, very gaunt, very unwell, as you would expect for somebody who hadn't been outside or seen the sunlight in, you know, eight years and was trapped in this tiny little apartment, essentially, for all of those years, year after year after year.
Assange was not at, as I understand it, the two days of hearings.
Have you been able to obtain in your time there any information about his physical and mental condition?
Yeah, that's correct.
He wasn't there.
I asked someone who did see him recently, about three months ago in October, and these are the words that this person used.
They said that he looks 70, 70 with a zero, 70 years old.
So, you know, I think that's quite descriptive.
The last time I saw him, which was on a video feed, because he was tuning in from the prison to watch one of the hearings.
This is about two years ago.
You know, I didn't even understand that that was him at first, like just to give you an idea of how shocking, you know, and again, I feel really bad for him.
He just looked bad and it took me a minute to understand that that was him because we were getting our things ready and we're getting ready to report.
And he really doesn't look well.
And this is the consequence of this persecution.
It's not just...
you know, a legal case.
No, they're really killing him slowly.
And obviously, when you're sent to the U.S., if you're sent to the U.S. and you're put under special administrative measures, it's going to be way worse than Belmarsh.
But that doesn't mean Belmarsh is OK.
You know, the fact that anyone in England is, number one, given a custodial sentence, so they're put in prison for a bail violation is, I mean, it's rare.
And not to mention in a maximum security prison, which is Belmarsh, which is Britain's Guantanamo, as you said.
And then on top of that, given 52 weeks, I mean, this is so clear that they want him to be in prison.
And they did this on purpose so that the United States can then unseal this indictment.
And I should just remind people that the original indictment had about six counts under the Espionage Act, which is already ludicrous.
And then after the deadline had already passed, they came out with a superseding indictment with 17 counts.
So it was all a ploy.
It was all a trick to get Assange in there, hit him with this indictment, and make sure he never leaves.
And there are people who were in Belmarsh Prison.
One of them is Abu Qatada.
He was like a Jordanian suspected member of al-Qaeda.
And even he was given better treatment.
out of the same prison and put under house arrest.
There's no reason Julian Assange, you know, if you're really gonna argue, okay, he's a flight risk, you can put him under house arrest.
He doesn't have to be in a maximum security prison where you're slowly killing him.
There's just no argument for this.
Not to mention the fact that he shouldn't be under house arrest at all, but you know, it just goes to show you how adamant and insistent they are on killing him.
And I wanna point out another thing.
In court, they discussed the fact that the CIA want to kill him.
And in the original ruling in 2021, when the extradition was blocked, it was only blocked on health grounds.
The judge didn't seem to think that this was relevant information, that the CIA wanted to kill him.
She was saying, well, you know, this is a court case that's still playing out in Spain because the security company contracted by the CIA was in Spain.
So, you know, she basically shrugged it aside.
And then the U.S.
lawyers, what they did this week is they said, well, this is not new information, the Yahoo News article.
And I was laughing to myself because, in a way, the U.S.
lawyer was right.
Her name is Dobbin.
We already know the CIA was trying to kill Assange in 2020.
We didn't need the Yahoo News article.
But it is relevant evidence.
So, you know, it's maybe not fresh evidence, but it's certainly relevant evidence.
And the fact that, you know, they want to send Assange to a country Oh, I know, I know.
And you know what?
him is egregious beyond words.
I mean, any proper court in the world would have already thrown this case out from day one.
I don't even know why this has been going on for four years.
And, you know, they put on such a show with these mighty buildings and, you know, royal courts of justice.
There's no justice in these courtrooms.
I guarantee you that, Glenn.
It's really a kangaroo court.
Oh, I know.
I know.
And you know what?
Honestly, you know, it makes me so sick is, as you know, you're describing so accurately the fact that they're murdering Julian in real like, you know, in this kind of slow, deliberate way.
I think it's worth noting, and you kind of alluded to it, but just to make it manifest.
He hasn't been charged with any crimes.
He's not in prison because he's been convicted of any crimes.
They originally convicted him of a bail-jumping misdemeanor and gave him the maximum sentence possible under the law, which is 51 weeks, just under a year, that he has served the sentence for years ago.
He's only in a high-security prison because they concluded he is a flight risk while waiting This extradition request to work its way through the courts, so they've effectively destroyed Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, just as Mike Pompeo in 2017 vowed he intended to do, without even having to charge him with the crime.
And then, you know, the parallels between things like what just happened to Navalny in a Russian prison, where he kind of died slowly and was put in these horrific prison conditions near the Arctic, what was done to Gonzalo Lira in Ukraine, You have this being done by our own government, by an allied government in Ukraine, and it's completely ignored.
And the only time it's paid attention to is when there's some political benefit to derive and extract and exploit from it when it happens to, when it's done by one of our official enemies.
Let me ask you about this hypothesis that I have, and I realize it's somewhat speculative.
The fact that now you're saying that there was more skepticism of the government's case at this court than you suspected feeds a little bit into my theory.
And it's not just a theory I invented, but it's well grounded in, I think, some facts, which is I can't imagine that the Biden Justice Department actually wants to bring Julian Assange Two American soil in an election year where he would stand trial in a Northern Virginia courthouse.
There would be endless protests outside that courthouse.
It would be a circus.
He'd have the right to get classified information.
Biden would be the first president to ever preside over the imprisonment or the trial of a publisher of information under the Espionage Act, as opposed to someone inside the government who leaked.
There'd be protests against Biden.
He already has a problem on his left.
Over this?
It seems like they got what they wanted, which is the destruction of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, and I wonder if you think, in some way, they're looking for a way out of this now.
Honestly, I hope for the best, but I expect the worst, because this thing is like, even if he goes to the European Court of Human Rights, let's say that the appeal or the application for appeal fails, you know, this takes easily years until they can help him and issue a ruling then.
So, on the one hand, I absolutely understand what you're saying, that maybe they want to finish up with this case and throw it away, but the risk is that If tomorrow morning, let's say for example, hypothetically, the extradition case fails, you know, in six months, let's say you have a new administration, they could just start up a new one and charge him now with the Vault 7 files, the CIA files in 2017 that were published by WikiLeaks in 2017.
Again, it would still be a circus.
It would still be completely baseless and an attack on press freedoms.
But they did this on purpose, where they didn't charge Julian with all the things that are available to them, because they know the UK will accept the application, even though it's bogus.
And so that worries me, the fact that they didn't use the Vault 7 leaks.
And you mentioned Mike Pompeo.
He was the CIA director when those files were leaked, excuse me, published.
By Wikileaks.
And Joshua Schultz, who leaked them to Wikileaks, was recently given 40 years in prison.
So they haven't completely lost sight of these things.
And this is actually what made Mike Pompeo so angry and why they started this whole indictment against Assange, why they started drawing up plans about killing Assange in the embassy or kidnapping him from the embassy and rendering him to the United States.
So the fact they have left that on the side, it really worries me.
And, I mean, Biden had the possibility His administration had the possibility to drop this case anytime during the last couple of years, and they chose to go forward with it.
So, as far as I'm concerned, I view them just as guilty as the Trump administration for doing that to Julian, because they could have spared him several years of pain.
They could have spared his family several years of pain and stopped this circus, but they haven't.
I do see the problems that this presents to him in an election year, but I think that the fact Biden is killing all these people in Gaza, for example, and doesn't give a crap, Like, he really doesn't care.
He's just going ahead with it.
You know, I don't see why he wouldn't continue with Julian's prosecution.
Yeah, and I think what it, and this just as a last question, I think, you know, what it illustrates is that even if it weren't in the political interest of Joe Biden to have this circus and sideshow of Julian Assange's prosecution, we know that in Washington, the people who reign supreme are not the elected officials, certainly not Joe Biden.
Who can barely tie his own shoes.
It is this permanent power faction in Washington, which is the U.S.
security state.
And there are few people they despise and hate and want the death of more than Julian Assange, because he has actually done what a journalist is supposed to do, which is gone around the world adversarially reporting on them.
And I really, I mean, I guess this is kind of the counter theory to the hypothesis that I described in the prior question.
like, I think that they would pretty much stop at nothing to kill him.
We know they actually plotted under Mike Pompeo at the CIA to assassinate Julian Assange.
That is reported by Mike Isikoff.
It has been confirmed in several lawsuits.
And so we don't even need to speculate on that.
And I think what we're seeing here is the kind of years of built-up rage that Julian Assange was able to do, actually valuable reporting about the way in which the U.S.
security state commits crimes.
And we're seeing the illusory nature of press freedoms.
Like if you're Natasha Bertrand or Jeffrey Goldberg or whomever and you work for The Atlantic or CNN and you dutifully say the things they tell you to say, you have all the press freedom in the world.
Press freedom ends and your life gets destroyed.
When you start disclosing things, they actually want you to help them keep hidden.
And this is, I think, what the lesson above all else in this case is.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we were just talking about this yesterday, how the New York Times would go and ask for permission, basically, from the State Department before publishing things that were obviously in the public's interest, you know?
I mean, that shows you the difference between Wikileaks and other news organizations or legacy media.
It's that Wikileaks are actually doing journalism.
They really challenged everything.
From the way you leak documents, you know, the fact that you could just upload them anonymously to the website, and now all these news outlets have copied that from WikiLeaks.
You can go on the Washington Post, they'll have that feature, but it was innovated by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
And the fact that, you know, you could just go on the website and search things and just read it as it is and have access to that knowledge, where they've really democratized knowledge.
They've really given information that is relevant to the public, to the public, where usually it's kept secret.
And not to mention the crimes that have been hidden.
I mean, in addition to all these conspiracies and stopping EU governments from basically prosecuting CIA agents involved in torture, there are really multiple layers to these revelations.
And there was also the Duma gas attacks, how basically they say Bashar al-Assad was gassing people.
And then WikiLeaks showed that actually the United States, you know, through years of lobbying the OPCW, had turned it into an organization where these things were doctored, you know, scientists were ignored.
So from the Iraq war to the State Department cables, to the Vault 7 leaks, there are so many people, so many organizations in the government, in the US government and the UK government, that really hate this kind of journalism.
But it's real journalism.
It's actual journalism.
It's really in the interest of the public to know these things.
And the fact that they also made it difficult for people to cover this case.
You have to understand that this is scandalous for any country, never mind the UK, which has supposedly developed first world modern democracy with open justice, that you have to fight tooth and nail to get into the courtroom.
They make it so difficult.
And then you can't, you know, some of the journalists who couldn't get in, they were in an overflow room next door to me or watching remotely.
And they couldn't hear anything because half the microphones don't work.
There are people who also covered this case since the beginning who were denied access, even though they're based in Australia and the U.S.
Julian Assange is from Australia.
The U.S.
is trying to extradite him.
How is their jurisdiction not relevant to this case?
So, you know, they made it very difficult for people to actually see what's going on because they know that they're wrong.
They know that what they're doing is bad.
They know that this is illegal.
And they know that they're complicit in, you know, not just the death of a journalist, but the attack on journalism itself.
And the fact that so many people in the press have done nothing to help Julian Assange is really scandalous.
So if anything happens to him, and it already is, it's really on their hands.
All these people, all these outlets, you know, The Guardian, the BBC, The New York Times, had years and years to lobby for his release.
If they'd actually done their jobs, Julian Assange would be free.
He wouldn't be in a prison.
There's no way the government would get away with this, that you have judges with links to MI6 that are overseeing the hearing, you know, that have links to the Tory establishment.
I should just add, you know, because I want to talk about the judges.
One of the judges, the high court justices, in this hearing this week, Her brother was the head of the BBC until last year, and then he had to resign in a scandal.
And her father was a lifelong peer, so in the House of Lords, a Tory.
And Johnson is the other one.
He represented MI6 in previous cases and said that there were no U.K.
war crimes committed in Iraq.
So despite these questions, these promising and engaging performances that they put on, You know, there should be, I need to put these things out there because, you know, it's a disclaimer, don't get your hopes up too much.
We are dealing with the same old establishment as the one that put Julian Assange in prison in the first place.
Absolutely, and you know, just on the issue of the media outlets, and then we need to go, which is, and obviously I could talk about this all night, and we're obviously gonna cover this as we go on, as the case goes on, is when these reports were first done in 2010, Wikileaks decided, because they were finding that when they would just publish information, nobody would go and report on it because it wasn't a scoop, it wasn't an exclusive, so these media outlets had no incentive to go and report on the documents Wikileaks was publishing.
So they partnered with the New York Times, they partnered with The Guardian, and Wikileaks would do things like write to the State Department and say, if there are documents you think we shouldn't publish, we're not gonna obey you if you tell us not to, but we're willing to hear your arguments about maybe things that should be redacted.
They were very careful.
in all the reporting that they did to make sure that they weren't endangering people, which is something that has been distorted.
But a lot of these media outlets, including the New York Times and The Guardian, benefited greatly from being able to get these documents and report on them and create headlines that created a lot of traffic.
And then they turned around and occasionally they may publish an editorial saying, oh, this seems like a dangerous case to press freedom.
But as you say, they've done nothing that was in their power to really put pressure on the government to stop it.
A lot of these journalists who work for these corporate media outlets actually do support the imprisonment and death of Julian Assange, in part because he's like a mirror that he shines on them for what journalism is supposed to be and what they actually do, which is completely different.
And to watch them spend the week Making all kinds of melodramatic denunciations about what Putin is doing to dissidents and journalists in Russia, when right under their nose their government is solely killing, I think, the most consequential journalists, but certainly one of them of our generation.
It's just all the hatred that these corporate media outlets have attracted is so well deserved.
You know, I mean, it's just, you know, as I say often, however much you hate them, it's really not enough.
They really are agents of the state.
And to watch this all happening, I mean, of course, it's very difficult to do it and to remain very calm about it because it's a person who's being destroyed because of the rights that he exercised that we're constantly told we have guaranteed to us.
Richard, thank you so much for all the great work you're doing.
I really encourage people to watch your show on YouTube where you cover not only the Assange case, but all kinds of issues of foreign policy and war in Ukraine, in Israel and Gaza, in Africa, all over the place.
It's one of the most informative shows, I think, on YouTube.
I've learned a lot from it.
And just go ahead before we say goodbye, just tell people exactly where and how they can find your work.
So, as you kindly said, you can find me on YouTube or also on Rumble.com slash RichardMethurst and also on Twitter.
If they just type RichardMethurst, they can find me there and on Patreon.
And again, thanks for having me, Glenn.
It's really great talking to you and especially about this important case.
Absolutely.
Always a pleasure.
I'm sure we'll talk shortly.
Have a good evening.
So speaking of the U.S.
security state, there are lots of things that get attention.
Obviously we spend a lot of time on the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, the various Middle East wars, bombing Iraq and Syria and Yemen, as well as things involving China.
These things are more overt, but there's a regime of sanctions that the United States often uses.
And I think a lot of people tend not to pay too much attention to it because it seems like this kind of benign or benevolent step short of war that people are kind of happy about.
Well, if the United States is only sanctioning, then perhaps it means that it's a substitute for war.
So we shouldn't care too much about sanctions.
They don't seem that destructive.
They don't seem that provocative.
And in reality, I think it's really worth delving into exactly what the sanctions regime is, because at any time, the United States is imposing sanctions regimes on multiple other countries that basically make it illegal or almost impossible to trade with those countries, to sell them any goods, to buy goods from them.
And typically the idea is that the point of it, even though sanctions are under international law an act of war, the claim of the United States government is we're doing this so that we don't have to go to war with these countries.
And instead we're weakening their governments to try and ensure that by causing suffering on the part of the people who live in those countries, they will rise up and change the government.
The problem is, is that never works.
Almost always the exact opposite happens, which is that the suffering of the people in those countries ends up weakening them, making them more dependent on that government and strengthening the government that we say we're trying to weaken through the sanctions regime.
And if I know that, and if studies prove that, obviously people in Washington know that as well, which raises the question of why the sanction regime continues to be a tool that almost attracts no opposition every time it's proposed.
And it's proposed and used all the time.
Just yesterday, or today rather, there's a new round of sanctions.
This from The Guardian.
Biden announces hundreds of new sanctions targeting Russia.
I didn't even know it was possible to find new things to sanction in Russia.
I assumed everything in Russia had already been sanctioned.
Quote, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine reaches its second anniversary, the U.S.
will impose new restrictions On Russian exports.
Quote, Joe Biden on Friday announced that Washington would issue more than 500 new sanctions targeting Russia as the U.S. seeks to increase pressure on Moscow.
Quote, they will ensure Putin pays an even steeper price for his aggression abroad and repression at home, Biden said, of the new sanctions.
So, after everything that we've been told Putin has done, after...
After he annexed Crimea.
After he invaded Ukraine.
After he committed all these war crimes.
After he killed journalists.
After he killed dissidents.
There were all these sanctions left to weaken him further that we hadn't used until today?
Does that make a lot of sense to you?
The Guardian goes on, quote, still Russia's economy has performed above expectations.
With the International Monetary Fund in January forecasting 2.6% GDP growth for 2024, a 1.5 point upgrade from an October estimate after a solid 3% growth in 2023.
An IMF spokesman, Julie Kozak, said on Thursday it was clear that Russia is now in a war economy, with military expenditures boosting weapons production, government social transfers propping up consumption, and inflation that is rising despite declines elsewhere.
So remember, we've been told, and I remember reports that we could show you from the first and second and third months of the war, where all of the advocates of this US involvement in Ukraine were telling us that Russia was on the verge of collapse, that the ruble was going to completely be hollowed out, that they were going to run out of artillery, and Bullets, because they just were going to be squeezed by the sanction regime that we imposed on them.
And here we are two years later, as well as being told that we were weakening Russia by sending hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian men to their deaths.
We were weakening Russia And here you find the Russian economy growing.
It's military, more powerful than ever.
They're in a war economy, just like the United States was during World War II.
And all of the military benefits and economic benefits that the United States often gets when it goes into a war footing are now happening in Russia, despite all of these sanctions that we continue to impose on them.
So aside from whatever moral or ethical issues there are with sanctions, there's also just the fact that they do not work.
as evidenced by what's taking place in Russia.
Now, here is an MSNBC report from this week where Michael McFaul, the former Obama administration ambassador to Russia, this is actually a report from MSNBC Morning this is actually a report from MSNBC Morning Joe show that actually We're going to get to that Michael McFaul video in just a second.
But here's just a report explaining what the Biden administration is doing.
Steve Ratner.
So how is it doing?
Because you would think at this point that it would be breaking down a bit.
But it's not.
The Russian economy.
But are you finding otherwise, Steve?
Yeah, no, it's not, Mika.
Sanctions are an important part of waging war against any adversary or any of our opponents.
But we have to be realistic about what they've accomplished.
In the case of Russia, unfortunately, they haven't accomplished that much.
So let's take a look.
So here is MSNBC.
Obviously, they are fanatically anti-Russian.
And as much as it hurts them, even they can't deny the data.
And they're admitting that our sanctions have done nothing.
In the wake, in the way of fulfilling any of the objectives that we claimed were going to be fulfilled by the sanctioned regime.
Just listen to them acknowledge this by doing nothing other than looking at the irrefutable data.
Look at the Russian economy since the war started.
And if you look at GDP, real GDP, over the last two years, you can see the Russian economy actually grew by 1.8 percent.
And that's more than most of the countries in Europe.
As Joe has been pointing out, far less than the U.S., still the shining city on the I have to make sure to do a campaign ad for Joe Biden.
He's presiding over the shining city on the hill.
So of course, Russia is nowhere near as prosperous and happy as the United States.
But still, even MSNBC is required to acknowledge that even with all these sanctions, it has more economic growth than much of the industrialized democratic world, including our Western European allies.
While the Ukraine economy, as you see at the end there, has basically gone into freefall, into collapse.
Kind of a pretty big number to rush over that way.
above all the rest of these countries.
And in contrast, Ukraine down 24% the size of its economy.
And that's been reflected.
Kind of a pretty big number to rush over that way.
Ukraine has lost a quarter of its economy, 25% drop, collapse in one year in its economy while the Russian economy continues to grow.
That not only illustrates the inefficacy of the sanctions regime, but also the way in which the United States is becoming utterly subverted and undermined in terms of our power to influence the world.
Our ally in this war, meaning the US government's ally, I should say, is getting decimated, can't keep up with artillery production, and has a The destruction of a quarter of their economy in one year while the Russian economy, who we've supposedly isolated from the world, is growing faster than Japan, France, Germany, and the UK's?
In the stock market, when the war started, I think we all thought, including myself, that this would be tough for the Russian economy.
Stock markets were up 25 percent in the first week, ended up down 40 percent by the end of 2022.
But now it's up 47 percent from where it was before all this started.
The Russian stock market is up almost 50 percent since the war began in 2022.
I remember people like Steve Ratner, exactly as I was saying, saying they were all saying, oh, look, the Russian economy is in free for all.
The ruble is going to collapse.
And here we are, and the Russian economy is growing, and their stock market, if you had invested in the Russian stock market, $10,000, say, on February 24, 2022, when the invasion happened, that $10,000 would now be worth $15,000 because there's been a 50% increase in would now be worth $15,000 because there's been a 50% increase in the value of the Russian The Russian economy is still doing well.
Steve, part of the reason for that is, of course, oil, the exporting of oil.
I was staggered to read in your in your information here that the oil exports are kind of back to where they were in 2021 before this war started, despite all these sanctions, because other countries have stepped in to help Russia here.
Well, you did my chart for me, Willie.
Sorry, I stole it.
No, that's okay.
I just want you to think for a second, and this is why this segment is so excellent, because...
I want you to remember all the things we were being told were happening as part of this war, that the entire world was united behind the United States, that Joe Biden had rallied the entire world, that Russia was completely isolated on the international stage.
None of that was true.
None of it was true.
None of it is true.
All sorts of countries are trading with Russia.
That's why their economy is growing.
That's why their oil experts are booming.
Everybody who wants to is buying from the Russian oil market, except for the United States and Western Europe, which has harmed its own citizens in all sorts of ways in pursuit of this war, including by having to buy more expensive natural gas and oil.
That was what Nord Stream 2 was supposed to be for, to allow Western Europeans To buy cheap natural gas from the Russians and by cutting themselves off from the Russian market, the Western Europeans and the Americans have completely harmed their own citizens and its economic prosperity.
But the rest of the world is happy to continue to trade with Russia because the sanction regime no longer works.
The United States no longer has the power that we were told it has at the start of this war to isolate anybody, certainly not a country like Russia.
What's going on?
But before, I should also mention additional oil.
Defense spending has helped the Russian economy.
They have more than doubled their defense spending, and that juices the economy.
But to Willie's point, you can see oil, Russian oil state revenues, and where they were before the war, we had this price spike.
This is price not selling more oil, but just price.
when the war started and then oil prices have remained relatively strong.
So Russian oil revenue is actually still above where it was before the war started.
And as Willy said, the sanctions have not had any impact on Russia's oil exports.
They're almost exactly the same as what they were before the war started.
But you can see a big shift in the mix.
You can see that Europe and the US have virtually eliminated Russian oil imports, but that's been picked up by three countries.
Turkey to a smaller extent, India big, and China big.
India 1,800% more oil from Russia than before.
So these sanctions have not had any effect on Russia's oil exports and therefore on its revenues.
So Steve, why India on that chart?
Is it out of necessity or why are they stepping in to help Ukraine as it, you know, effectively kills civilians waging a war?
It's basically necessity.
They obviously don't care that much about killing civilians in Ukraine by the war.
Oh yeah, that's what it is.
Only the United States cares.
Only Western Europe cares.
We're the benevolent ones.
The rest of the world doesn't care.
Maybe the rest of the world just doesn't think that the situation between Russia and Ukraine is as clear cut in terms of the morality play that we're told.
Here in Brazil, for example, the president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, who is a U.S.
ally, he just met this week with Secretary of State Blinken in Brasilia, where the United States considers Brazil a very important country that has friendly relations with the United States.
said during the campaign and has said since that he believes that at least half of the blame for this war belongs with the United States and Zelensky.
The United States that encouraged Zelensky stupidly to believe that he could actually win a war against Russia.
And therefore to not negotiate a diplomatic solution that could have averted all of this.
So it's the Democratic Party and the Mitch McConnell wing of the Republican Party that is willing to sacrifice the interests of its population over who gets to rule various provinces in eastern Ukraine, but the rest of the world is not.
And increasingly that is what is happening in the United States in terms of our ability to use soft power to run the world.
We are increasingly becoming isolated, certainly with the war in Ukraine and even more so with US support for the war in Israel.
I think a lot of people vaguely know that a lot of times when sanctions are imposed on a country, it kills a huge number of people.
And when we covered the letter that Osama bin Laden wrote to the American people in 2002 to justify the 9-11 attack, one of the main points he raised in addition to U.S.
troops on Saudi soil and U.S.
support for Israel to repress the Palestinians was exactly that.
The sanctions regime imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, a decade worth of sanctions, ended up killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
And that is often what the result is of the sanction regime.
Note that the sanction regime, while it killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, did not remove Saddam Hussein from power.
He stayed in power through 2003.
It took an actual full ground invasion to remove him from power.
But the sanction regime did nothing to Iraq other than kill a huge number of its citizens and immiserate the population.
And for what?
Here's the report of the International Committee of the Red Cross in December of 1999, Iraq 1989 to 1999, a decade of sanctions.
Quote, according to the UN Children's Fund UNICEF survey published in August 1999, infant mortality in most of Iraq has more than doubled in the nine years since US sanctions were imposed.
That's infant mortality, the number of babies we killed.
Iraqi babies.
In Central and Southern Iraq, home to 85% of the population, the death rate for children under 5 rose from 56 per 1,000 live births in the period 1984-1989 to 131 per 1,000.
per 1,000 live births in the period 1984 to 1989 to 131 per 1,000.
According to UNICEF statistics for November 1997, a third of all children under five are chronically malnourished.
This represents a 72% increase since 1991.
So when you're thinking about the effects of this sanctions regime and the idea that it's benevolent, it may not seem like it's that big of a deal if you're in the country imposing it.
But if you're in the country on whom it's being imposed, the result is things like a third of all children in the country under the age of five become chronically malnourished.
at a rate of 72 percent higher than prior to the imposition of the sanctions regime what do you think the people in that country and in that region start to think about the united states when they watch things like children enormous numbers being able to dying of malnourishment and starvation being able to unable to get basic medications that they need to cure and treat highly treatable diseases that they die from instead
all while the government remains not only in place and entrenched but even stronger the unicef are Article goes on, quote, Iraq's 130 hospitals, many of them built by foreign companies in the 1960s to the 1980s, have not received the necessary repairs or maintenance since the Gulf War, but above all since the imposition of sanctions.
They often lack, the hospitals do, the most basic tools such as stethoscopes, sterilizers, and writing paper.
The negative impact on the treatment received by patients, and hence on their health, is immense.
Now here's a notorious video in which the Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, who presided over the sanction regime imposed on the Iraqi people, was actually asked on 60 Minutes a question that I think these days you would never hear a corporate media journalist ask of a Democratic Secretary of State.
And this is a clip that resonated all throughout the Arab and Muslim world.
And people in the West saw it too.
I mean, it's an incredibly sociopathic face that Madeleine Albright showed the world.
And it didn't have to do with invasions or bombing campaigns or any of the things we typically associate with the US war machine.
Instead, it was about sanctions.
She says the U.S.
is trying to prevent Saddam Hussein from making and dropping a nuclear bomb or chemical weapons on other countries.
And she says he's still lying about his weapons programs.
We have heard that a half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.
You know, is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice.
But the price, we think the price is worth it.
It is a moral question, but the moral question is even a larger one.
Don't we owe to the American people and to the American military and to the other countries in the region that this may not be a threat?
Let me just ask you this question.
It is definitely the case that if you are a policymaker at a top level inside the U.S.
government, you have hard choices.
It's not like any one of your choices in certain situations will be morally pure.
I suppose we have to accept the fact that the most powerful country on the planet, which is what the United States was, especially in the 1990s.
That was the decade after the Soviet Union fell.
We were told we were going to get this great peace dividend.
We wouldn't have to spend money on our military anymore.
And of course, the Clinton administration found all sorts of wars to fight, including in the Balkans.
That was when Madeleine Albright said to Colin Powell, who was opposed to the intervention in the Balkans, what's the point of having this big, shiny, beautiful military if we don't use it?
It was like a toy to her.
You know, like, hey, we paid for this.
Why don't we use it?
But even if you want to give them license that, look, there's People they have to kill.
There's violence they have to use.
You would think someone's conscience would be bothered by that.
Like that somebody, when asked, the policy that you impose killed 500,000 Iraqi children.
And let's say that it wasn't 500,000.
People have debated that.
The UNICEF report says a couple hundred thousand.
Clearly hundreds of thousands of children died, Iraqi children, died from the U.S.
sanctions regime during that decade.
To just so unflinchingly look and say, yeah, it was absolutely worth it.
It's a tough call, but absolutely worth it.
That is sociopathic behavior of the worst kind and that is why I think sanctions deserve so much more attention.
Like I said, I think on some level Americans feel like, well, as long as the U.S.
isn't going to war, let them do sanctions, because that at least seems like a step before war.
But what is the point of it?
It never succeeds in weakening the country or removing the leader.
It only succeeds in miserating the population.
Hear from the Lancet.
In March of 2020, at the start of the COVID pandemic, you may recall that the COVID pandemic went from China to Iran.
And then the two hardest hit countries in Europe early on were Italy and Spain.
But Iran was overwhelmed with COVID cases at the very start of the pandemic before it even got to the United States.
And they were under some of the most repressive sanctions possible.
And you may look at the Iranian government and hate the Iranian government, but it's not the Iranian government that pays the price for these sanctions.
So here from the Lancet, you see the headline COVID-19 battle during the toughest sanctions against Iran.
Quote, the economic loss caused by the spread of COVID-19 in Iran coincides with the ever highest politically induced sanctions against the country.
Quote, although various sanctions have been in place for the past four decades, since May 2018, the unilateral sanctions opposed by the USA against Iran have increased dramatically to an almost total economic lockdown, which includes severe penalties for non-US companies conducting business with Iran.
The Iranian health sector, although among the most resilient in the region, has been affected as a consequence.
All aspects of prevention, diagnosis, and treatment are directly and indirectly hampered, and the country is falling short in combating the crisis.
Lack of medical, pharmaceutical, and laboratory equipment, such as protective gowns and necessary medication, has been scaling up the burden of the epidemic and the number of casualties.
We should not let history repeat itself.
More than half a million Iraqi children and nearly 40,000 Venezuelans were killed as a result of U.N.
Security Council and U.S.
sanctions of 1994 and 2017 to 2018, respectively.
Venezuela is another case where people decided that they hated Hugo Chavez, even though he never attacked any other country.
And therefore impose enormous amounts of suffocating sanctions on Venezuela, both under Hugo Chavez and then again under Nicolás Maduro.
And then we point to the fact that there's starvation in Venezuela and disease in Venezuela, which there is, at least in part because of this suffocating sanctions regime that did not weaken Hugo Chavez nor Nicolás Maduro.
All it did was immiserate the population.
So for what?
Here from NPR in April of 2021, quote, the beautiful dreams that are burnt, portraits from Iran under sanctions.
Kazim Mojaban, a manager in a private hospital in Yadz, said he is dealing with challenges that didn't exist before the sanctions, even though the U.S.
says its restrictions do not target the health center.
According to Mojban, shortages of medicines and surgical equipment are just some examples of how the sanctions end up affecting Iran's medical centers.
Neema Mousavi from the capital of Tehran has been under treatment for two years since receiving a kidney transplant.
She has confronted new challenges and struggles regarding her treatment, which she says started when the U.S.
reimposed sanctions on Iran.
Transplant medications are vital and rare.
Because of Iran's shortage of drugs, government-funded hospitals and clinics distribute medicines at the start of each month that cover four weeks of treatment.
She doesn't know whether she will still have next month's medication.
Why is that justified?
It doesn't prevent Iran from doing much of anything that we say we want to prevent them from doing.
And, if anything, it's the reason why there's so much hatred and hostility towards the United States in that region.
Ron Paul, who I think most people know was a principled non-interventionist, still is, a principled opponent of war, also was a person who believes in economic liberty.
He's a libertarian.
He's the anti-communist.
Nobody can suggest that Ron Paul is sympathetic to communism as an ideology, to put that mildly.
And yet he was often horrified by the savage and barbaric regime of sanctions that we imposed on Venezuela and Cuba and Iran and Russia and North Korea.
For reasons that he has explained many times, including in this August 1st, 2012 speech that he gave on the House floor about the evils of sanctions.
When you put on sanctions on a country, it's an act of war.
And that's what this is all about.
The first thing you do when war breaks out between two countries is you put sanctions on them.
You blockade the country.
So this is an act of war.
What would we do if somebody blockaded and put sanctions on us and prevented the importation of any product into this country?
We'd be furious.
We'd declare war.
We'd go to war.
So we are the antagonists.
We're over there poking our nose and poking our nose in other people's affairs, just looking for the chance to start another war.
First it's Syria, then Iran.
We have too many wars.
We need to stop the wars.
We don't have the money to fight these wars any longer.
And as he noted, sanctions is an act of war.
It's a way of attacking other countries.
We constantly say here in the United States, it's time to stop trying to fix other countries, interfere in their countries, dictate who their leaders are.
That's what sanctions are designed to do.
And yet we almost never hear opposition to these sanctions, even though they are costly for Americans in so many ways.
Donald Trump, as happens so often, Had a kind of instinctive opposition to a lot of policies this administration end up imposing.
One of them was sanctions in Iran.
Here from NBC News in September of 2019, reported that Donald Trump and John Bolton sparred over lifting Iran's sanctions.
The National Security Advisor departed abruptly after President Trump suggested he might lift some sanctions as an incentive for Tehran to get to the negotiating table.
That was always Trump's instinct.
In every case.
was to avoid war and negotiate.
Quote, "As leading national security advisor, John Bolton was a leading advocate of the Trump administration's so-called, quote, "maximum pressure campaign designed to squeeze "Iran's economy until its leadership was forced "to curtail its aggression in the region "and concede to U.S. demands to dismantle "its nuclear program, none of which has happened." "maximum pressure campaign designed to squeeze "Iran's economy until its Trump withdrew from the U.S.
from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal last year.
Iran has since decided not to comply with the agreement.
Trump recently has said he would meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani perhaps later this month on the sidelines of the U.N.
General Assembly session in New York without preconditions.
But the person close to Bolton said the President went further during a 2 p.m.
meeting on Monday in suggesting he would lift U.S.
sanctions.
The possibility of Iran's sanctions relief was in part what prompted Bolton to submit a resignation letter to the President the following morning, this person said.
Obviously, these leaks are coming from John Bolton to make himself look good.
I resigned in protest, on principle, in anger that Donald Trump wanted to lift sanctions on Iran.
But Trump naturally wants to forge peace deals, and his idea is We're going to nullify the 2015 deal that Obama negotiated with Iran because it's not tough enough.
We want a tougher agreement with Iran.
But to get that, we need to negotiate with them and not try and destroy their population.
Here from NPR, April of 2023, life in Syria under U.S.
sanctions.
Earthquakes in Syria expose the devastating needs of people in war-torn country and raise the questions about the impact of U.S.
sanctions.
The reason we were told that we had to spend a billion dollars a year under President Obama to allow the CIA to try and fight a dirty war alongside Al Qaeda and ISIS, who are our allies in Syria, to remove Bashar al-Assad is because we cared so deeply about the Syrian people.
We just want the best for the Syrian people.
We want to protect the Syrian people.
And yet the sanctions that we ended up imposing that obviously have no effect on removing Bashar al-Assad did the following.
Quote, hospitals are lacking MRI machines, CAT scans, heart monitors, and even anesthesia and cancer medications.
Oil and banking sanctions were toughened over the past decade to punish President Bashar al-Assad's government as it attacked rebels, bombed civilians, and jailed tens of thousands.
The U.S.
says its sanctions target Assad's regime and not humanitarian assistance.
But doctors in Syria say they have trouble importing basic supplies because foreign banks fear financial penalties.
The head of Syria's civil defense said his teams didn't have enough equipment to save lives after the earthquakes.
Major General Safwan Ballou said they were in need of basic tools like jackhammers and hydraulic lifts.
So it's the same thing repeated over and over and obviously the same thing has happened in Cuba.
The same thing has happened in Venezuela.
Here just to give you a report of the effects of sanctions on Venezuela.
Obviously it has had no effect on weakening that country's government.
Here from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, it's written by Mark Weisbrot, who I know and who is an expert in Latin American financial and military policy, as well as Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia professor and economist who is a regular on our show.
And they published this report in April of 2019 entitled Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment, the Case of Venezuela.
And they detailed as well the same kinds of destruction on the health care system in Venezuela that make it impossible for ordinary Venezuelans to get access to health care.
Obviously, when someone like Hugo Chavez has a medical problem, as he did when he had cancer, he was able to travel and get some of the best medical care, including Cuba.
These don't affect the leaders of the country, only the ordinary people.
And then beyond all those same harms to medical care and the like and the hospital system that we detailed in Syria and Iran.
This also happened as a result of the sanctions on Venezuela.
There was a 31% increase in general mortality from 2017 to 2018.
I just want you to think about what that means.
There was a one-third increase in the number of people who died in Venezuela as a result of sanctions from 2017 to 2018.
This would imply an increase of more than 40,000 deaths.
More than 3,000 people were estimated to be at risk because of lack of access to medicines or treatments.
For what?
How do we justify just killing 40,000 Venezuelans in one year?
What is that accomplishing?
Quote, "This includes an estimated 80,000 people with HIV who have not had antiretroviral treatment since 2017, 16,000 people with cancer, and 4 million people with diabetes and hypertension, many of whom cannot obtain insulin or cardiovascular medicine.
So you have treatable diseases like HIV, and yet people, because of the sanctions in Venezuela, cannot access medications to save their lives." Food imports have dropped sharply along with the overall imports.
In 2018, they were estimated at just $2.46 billion as compared with $11.2 billion in 2013.
The United Nations finds that the groups most vulnerable to the accelerating crisis includes children and adolescents, including many who can no longer attend school, people who are in poverty or extreme poverty, pregnant and nursing women, older persons, indigenous people, women and adolescent girls older persons, indigenous people, women and adolescent girls at risk, people with disabilities.
The sanctions also violate U.S.
law.
Each executive order since March 2015 declares the United States is suffering from a, quote, national emergency because of the situation in Venezuela.
This is required by U.S.
law in order to impose such sanctions.
The national emergency is invoked under the 1976 National Emergencies Act.
Here is Mike Pompeo.
He obviously featured a lot in our first segment on Julian Assange and I regard him as Donald Trump's worst mistake.
He put him in charge of the CIA and that also made him Secretary of State, even though Mike Pompeo is a classic neocon.
Everything Donald Trump claimed he opposed, that was by far Trump's worst vulnerability, is putting people in power who flattered him.
Regardless of what their ideology or their politics were or what they intended to do or whether they had any interest in aligning with the political platform on which he ran.
We'll see whether or not if he wins again, he makes that same mistake.
But Mike Pompeo was Exhibit A in that character flaw of Donald Trump that was one of the worst flaws of the Trump presidency.
Here's Mike Pompeo pontificating on the sanctions regime.
...continue to take place.
The second question was... Matt, remind me what the second one was.
The first was about... Oil.
Oil.
Can you... We're trying to get the oil for the Venezuelan people.
Not for you.
For the Venezuelan people.
We are attempting to restore basic rule of law, transparency, democracy, and the wealth that sits in the property basin of Venezuela is for the Venezuelan people.
And then the pace of... And the pace of... Yeah, the first question is the pace of change.
We love the Venezuelan people.
We love them so much.
Just like we love the Syrian people that we impose on them sanctions that completely devastate their lives, kill them in large numbers, prevent them from getting medications, prevent them from getting basic sustenance, including food.
That's how much we love the Venezuelan people.
That's how much we love the Syrian people.
And even if you don't care about the moral and ethical component of sanctions, they have incredible geopolitical blowback, and they just simply don't work to the point where even this most comprehensive sanctions regime that has been imposed on Russia has coincided with the kind of economic growth that we began the segment by documenting and the ability of Russians to simply form their own separate economy outside of the United States
control where their oil revenues are increased, where their economic prosperity is increased, where their military strength is increased as well.
That is the reality of the sanctions regime.
And so when you hear a government or a government official saying, oh, we're going to impose sanctions and And you think to yourself, OK, well, that's pretty harmless.
It's better than war.
Oftentimes it is an act of war.
It can be as devastating as war.
It can kill as many people as war.
And it can generate the kind of blowback on the United States every bit as much as bombing or coups or all the other arms and weapons that we use for endless war and domination of these various regions can do as well.
Now, to help us understand the sanctions regime generally, but also as it applies to Russia, we have a specialist in this topic here.
His name is David Siegel.
He's a professor at St.
Joseph's University.
His background is in comparative politics, and his research has focused on state formation and transitions to capitalism within the state to the former Soviet Union, which obviously includes Ukraine.
He had an April 2022 article in the journal World Affairs entitled, quote, The Failure of U.S.
Sanctions on Russia.
that obviously ended up being quite prescient since his argument was that sanctions regime on Russia is unlikely to change Russian behavior.
I think it's an understatement, if anything, to say that that view has been vindicated.
Professor Siegel, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us tonight.
It's great to have you.
Thanks for having me, Glenn.
Sure.
So we just went through this kind of, you know, you know, several decade old body of research about how sanctions often fail to achieve their stated outcome and at the same time impose all kinds of harms on the countries that we're targeting without any sort of benefit geostrategically in the United States.
If I know about all this and you're doing work and you're able to questionately warn that Russian sanctions on Russia would be unlikely to change their behavior, clearly a lot of people in Washington know that as well.
So what is the rationale for this ongoing imposition of sanctions on so many countries, including this new round today or this week on Russia?
It's hard to say, to be honest.
I mean, a lot of it, some people would say, is purely symbolic, because most people know that the sanctions don't really work and are not going to work.
I think there's an important distinction to be made.
You're making it implicitly, and others make it implicitly, but there's a distinction between the political effects of sanctions and the economic effects of sanctions.
When we say that they don't work, what we mean, and it's not just me, there's a huge academic literature on this, and there's a consensus that, politically speaking, they don't work.
They don't cause the target state to change its behavior.
Economically, they tend to be devastating, but the economic devastation is not supposed to be the goal.
The economic pressure is supposed to produce a political outcome, and that political outcome seems never to materialize.
In all the cases that you just mentioned from Cuba, I mean, there have been sanctions on Cuba Since the 1950s, Cuba, Iraq, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, and the list goes on.
I had actually argued that the sanctions on Russia, not only were they not working politically, but they were counterproductive and were causing Russia to become more antagonistic.
This I wrote actually before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I think it's important to note that the US sanctions on Russia Did not begin two years ago.
That's the common framing now in the media.
The sanctions on Russia started in 2014 under Barack Obama and they were continued under Donald Trump and they were now obviously ratcheted up significantly after 2022 after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
But the U.S.
sanctions on Russia began after Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014.
So we're nearing the 10-year anniversary.
At the time, this was seen as a radical kind of U.S.
move, and it was pretty clear after a few years that they were not changing Russian behavior.
The stated objective at that time was to get Russia to withdraw from Crimea and give up its territorial ambitions there.
Obviously, Russia did not do that.
In 2018, Former Ambassador Daniel Freed, who is an architect of these sanctions under the Obama administration, was taking questions at a Senate hearing and defended the sanctions as working based on the logic that even though Russia was not withdrawing from Crimea, it was preventing Russia from taking more aggressive measures that it otherwise would take if sanctions were not in place.
And he specifically said that if we had not imposed sanctions on Russia, they would have invaded Ukraine and conquered all of Ukrainian territory.
That was in 2018.
What's happened?
Sanctions were continued under the Trump administration.
It clearly did not prevent Russia from invading Ukraine, okay, in 2022.
Now the United States has ratcheted up those sanctions.
There's enormous sanctions on Russia at this point.
As you said, it seems to be having not only is it having no political effect, but I think actually what's really interesting and novel is that they're also having no economic impact.
That's different from other cases of sanctions.
Russia has been able to very skillfully navigate through these sanctions, building new trade alliances with China and India, Iran, basically the BRICS countries.
It's getting off the dollar, it's separating itself from the US financial system, and it's still able to survive.
Its oil revenue remains the same.
It's economy, as you noted, the IMF actually predicts that Russia's economy is going to grow by 2.6% in 2024.
That would make it the leading country in all of Europe.
And when the sanctions were first imposed in 2022, I mean, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we were told that the Russian economy was going to collapse.
A lot of those same people are now saying, oh yeah Russia's economy is growing but the only reason it's growing is because it's spending so much on the military.
And the rationale of the sanctions was precisely so that Russia was not going to be able to spend money on the military.
It's like the logic of the experts is constantly being rewritten.
And it's pretty clear, actually, what all of this means is that the United States is losing its economic influence and is not able to shape the events at a global level, as it has been able to do.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States really started relying heavily on sanctions after the collapse of the Soviet Union because it was a very easy way to go around the world and sort of exert its strength.
But here it's pretty clear.
It's like Not having very much influence at all.
So I do want to ask you about and explore that question of whether this kind of multipolarity is really here, whether the BRICS alliance is actually providing now a formidable alternative to a lot of these countries who I think are driven by a lot of resentment over the idea that the United States can just dictate to the world who can trade with them and who can't whenever the United States feels displeased with some of their actions.
There's a lot of kind of resentment driving the emergence of this alternative coalition.
But just to make, I guess, the best case for the sanctions regime that I can in order to hear your argument against it...
I think the argument is that even if it doesn't dislodge the government from power, that what it ends up doing is it ends up significantly impeding the lives of the people who wield the most amount of power in those countries.
The wealthiest people, the elites, the oligarchs.
Just this week, for example, at Brazil, as kind of an illustrative example, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was visiting Brazil, and he originally went to Rio de Janeiro for a G20 meeting where he happened to be in the same room with Secretary of State Blinken, where Blinken came.
They didn't talk, but they were one of a very few number of officials in the same room with the mayor of Rio de Janeiro.
And when the foreign minister, the Russian foreign minister, was scheduled to then travel to Brasilia to meet with President Lula da Silva, he couldn't get gasoline for his plane, for the Russian plane, because the providers of aircraft fuel in Brazil are all because the providers of aircraft fuel in Brazil are all tied to economy and we're concerned about the ramifications that they've sold fuel to the Russians.
And so Lula dispatched a government plane, a military plane, to take Lavrov to Brasilia.
But it's kind of an example of how a lot of the people in Russia, the political officials, the elites, the kind of oligarchs who used to travel to Western Europe and now have had their assets seized or have had their lives impeded, that that kind of pressure is supposed to foster Behavioral change, that was what you addressed in your article.
Why doesn't that work?
I mean, it does seem like those impediments are real, at least in some instances.
Right.
Logically, it seems like those sanctions should have worked.
And by that, I mean, if you go back to 2014, the sanctions that the United States first imposed on Russia are what are called targeted sanctions.
They weren't intended to affect the broader Russian economy.
They were really designed to target Putin's closest allies and officials in the Russian government.
To make them bear a personal cost in the ways that you've just described by freezing assets or making it very difficult to access their wealth that they have stored in European and American banks.
And the logic is that these are the people that Putin relies on to stay in power.
I think that's actually true, that underlying truth, that that's correct.
Putin does rely on these very wealthy oligarchs to stay in power.
And Putin is supposed to understand the politics of those people having serious grievances.
You know, he's supposed to therefore change Russian policy to appease them.
But it simply has not had that effect.
Putin was able to do various kinds of things by using the leverage of the state and using credits and subsidies and tax policies and incentivizing a lot of oligarchs to bring their money back into Russian banks.
using the leverage of the state and using credits and subsidies and tax policies and incentivizing a lot of oligarchs to bring their money back into Russian banks.
One of the paradoxical effects of those sanctions, those targeted sanctions in 2014, is that Russia had a huge inflow of capital.
One of the paradoxical effects of those sanctions, those targeted sanctions in 2014, is that Russia had a huge inflow of capital.
I mean, oligarchs were moving all of their money out of European and American banks and were recapitalizing the Russian banking system.
Russia's banks, actually, just as another piece of evidence of how badly these sanctions work economically, Russian banks just posted their largest ever profits this year.
There's the money of the oligarchs is now basically being protected by the Russian state and And I would say there is more of an alliance between the Russian oligarchs and Vladimir Putin than there was before the sanctions started.
So they're having a counterproductive effect.
I mean, there was an article in Bloomberg that stated this very bluntly.
It was from 2017 or 18 that said, The sanctions are bringing Russia's oligarchs right into Putin's arms.
You know, they're consolidating the state elite there.
And I think before this, a lot of Russian oligarchs, I mean, they were internationalists.
They were bringing their money all over the world.
They had incentives not to keep it in Russia, of course, because the rule of law is not very strong there.
And now the opposite is true.
I think they feel vulnerable to European and American power, and they have an incentive to work more with the Russian state and keep their assets inside Russia.
Yeah, I mean, there were Russian oligarchs, like the brothers who founded the encrypted app Telegram, who then also founded kind of the Russian Facebook, who kind of got driven out of Russia for not turning over data.
And they had their wealth trifled with.
I mean, they're certainly doing perfectly fine.
But there have been other instances of billionaires, Russian billionaires, being expelled or having their wealth seized.
So there did seem to be an incentive that has now backfired, as you said.
But beyond the kind of economic component, That you just very adeptly laid out.
I think one of the things that has alarmed people, or left a lot of people confused, and I may even count myself among them, is the fact that we spend almost a trillion dollars a year on our military, and we have done everything possible to try and get artillery into the hands of the Ukrainians, and not just us, but all of our NATO allies, everyone in Europe has done the same, and somehow under this
Supposedly very intensive sanctions regime that we were told we're gonna make the Russians run out of bullets.
I remember being told that in April and May and June of 2022.
The Russians have wildly outproduced all of the NATO including United States when it comes just to the mere production of artillery.
A major reason that they're winning the war along with drones and other things.
How have they been able to do that?
How have they been able to manufacture and produce so much more military equipment than even the Wealthiest and most militarized country in history, which is the United States.
Well, first of all, Russia has a huge arms industry.
So, I mean, they're quite good at making weapons.
The problem is that the sanctions were supposed to restrict their ability to get important imports into their weapons manufacturing.
And they've been able to get around this quite easily, actually.
They've just started importing all of those products from China.
For one, that's basically why the sanctions are not working.
China is basically providing Russia with everything that it needs.
Russian imports from China have skyrocketed.
Its imports from Europe and the United States have plummeted, and China's made up most of the difference.
In addition, Russia has worked a lot with the states of Central Asia and the Caucasus, to a slightly lesser extent Turkey, and is basically has found buyers in those states to import these goods from both Europe and the United States.
So, for example, they'll be imported into Kyrgyzstan, and then Kyrgyz businesses will export them to Russia, completely skirting the restrictions.
So, in other words, Russia actually is still able to get a lot of inputs from the West.
I actually read a report, I don't know if, you know, it's just almost anecdotal, but the Russian weapons that have been recovered on the battlefield still are, like 98% of the components are still from Western sources.
I also read a report recently, you know, British... - Shhh.
exports to Russia plummeted by 75% after the sanctions after 2022.
But its exports to Uzbekistan went up by the same amount.
And Uzbek exports to Russia went up.
So it's like all of the product is just moving through other places.
And honestly, Russia's been politically and diplomatically adept at navigating through this.
China and India are huge counterweights to the United States.
And this is why I do think this marks, I mean, you know, I hate to make such bold statements, really, but it potentially marks a huge change in geopolitics where you do see this transformation happening, where the economic power of China and India and the BRICS as a bloc really does seem where the economic power of China and India and the BRICS as a bloc really does seem to be undermining the Again, politically, the sanctions probably would have never worked anyway, but economically even, Russia's basically able to get around them.
There's almost no discernible impact of the sanctions economically in Russia.
In the case of Venezuela or Iran, as you described earlier, you just don't see that in Russia.
Stores are full.
People have consumer products.
I mean, there's some inflation.
One of the obvious specialties that you have as a scholar and academic is the former Soviet state, which of course include Ukraine.
You know, I just spoke to somebody in Moscow today and I there's no discernible change in everyday life in the economy there.
One of the obviously specialties that you have as a scholar and academic is the former Soviet states, which, of course, include Ukraine.
So I just want to ask you, there's, of course, a protracted debate in the United States about what caused the invasion in 2022 of Russian troops into Ukrainian territory.
Obviously, there's been a raging civil war of Russian backed separatists in eastern Ukraine against the central government in Kiev and the like.
But obviously a big escalation when Russian troops in this number invade Ukraine.
And obviously, some people say, well, it's because Putin just, I guess, out of the blue became a bad man, sort of like a Hitlerian figure.
I don't think it's a very serious theory, but a lot of people are convinced of that in the United States.
Others say that he suddenly has territorial ambitions to conquer all of Ukraine.
And then, of course, others say that it was, at least in part, a defensive act against provocative acts by NATO and the United States to threaten Yeah, that's a great question.
I won't claim that I know the answer.
And I think one of the reasons why I think that this happened is because there are so many reasons for Russia to do it.
of what finally led Putin and the Russians to invade on this level in February 2022?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I won't claim that I know the answer.
And I think one of the reasons why I think that this happened is because there are so many reasons for Russia to do it.
So there's probably some truth to all of the different causes that have been discussed.
But I happen to put a lot of weight on Russia's concerns about NATO expansion.
But I happen to put a lot of weight on Russia's concerns about NATO expansion.
And the reason for that is there's a pretty long and well-documented history of Russia speaking out against NATO expansion, explaining very, very clearly, and I'd say even politely, in its diplomacy over the course of 20 years, that it finds NATO expansion to be threatening, that that it finds NATO expansion to be threatening, that it would prefer that there wasn't NATO expansion, that it would like to work closer with NATO.
And the reason for that is there's a pretty long and well-documented history of Russia speaking out against NATO expansion, explaining very, very clearly, discussed.
And then, of course, most famously, in 2008, when George W. Bush opened the door to Ukraine and Georgia, I mean, Vladimir Putin said at the time, this is a red line.
This is a major threat to Russian security.
The other possible causes, let's say, Let's say the heightened Russian ethno-nationalism and its desire to reunite with the ethnic Russian people in Ukraine or protect ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
There's something to those.
I mean, that's real.
And certainly the Russian public, I think, there's an emotional appeal to the Russian public for those reasons.
And those reasons are probably real, but you don't see decades-long insistence by the Russian leaders that this is very important.
And to me, that helps break out from the news cycle context.
And if you just think about it historically and pay attention to what Russia's been saying, it seems like NATO expansion is is a huge part of it, if not, you know, again, in my view, I know you've had John Mearsheimer on the show many times, and I mostly agree with him on this issue.
So let me ask you a little bit about internal Russian politics, just something that we think we learn very little about in the West because it's so much propaganda, and it's hard to discern truth from propaganda.
In 2008 there was this memo written by the current CIA director Bill Burns to Condoleezza Rice and other Bush officials who were kind of proponents of NATO expansion in which he basically said what you just said which is that not only for Putin but essentially everybody in Moscow including Putin's liberal opponents and critics The idea of NATO expansion into Ukraine is a red line.
It's not just for Putin.
It's for pretty much the entire political class in Russia, including Putin's political opposition.
This week, of course, there was a ton of attention paid to the death of Alexei Navalny.
I think a lot of people ended up being surprised to learn that at least in his past, if not his present, he had a kind of political ideology that to the Western and American ear sounds very I guess you could say fascist, you know, very kind of shocking statements about how he views Muslims and other non-white people in Russia of being subhuman, the need to exterminate them.
Some of these ads that he did, you know, there are people in 2019, 2020, 2021 describing Alvani as kind of more extremist or more nationalist or more to what we would, if you want to impose the left or right framework on Russia, more to the right, the far right, certainly than Putin is.
And I think a lot of Americans want to believe that there's this Russian opposition that's just very liberal, very pro-Western, you know, very similar libertarian rising up against Putin.
What do you make as best you can of the nature of Russia's internal politics, the extent and nature of whatever opposition there is to Putin's rule?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a great question.
The simple answer is that what we would call liberalism, let's say pro-Western, pro-democratic forces in Russia, have simply been decimated.
And a large reason for that is the legacy of the 1990s.
The liberal parties of Russia basically were the The parties that led the path towards the post-Soviet transition were in power under Yeltsin, led the transition to capitalism, the transition to democracy, and the policies of the 1990s were absolutely disastrous for ordinary Russian people.
I mean, it's just undeniable.
And as a result, the liberal parties of Russia Have just lost.
I mean they've just lost power.
They're just not popular.
I mean they really the the devastation of the 1990s really undermined the liberal movement and liberal parties of Russia and they were never that.
If I can just interrupt there, because it's not intuitively obvious why that would be true.
I guess the narrative is that what ended up happening was with the United States and Yeltsin, there was kind of this austerity and this neoliberalism imposed on Russia.
There was a lot of corrupt privatization that made a ton of people very, very rich at the expense of pretty much everybody else.
Why would those events cause a decline in popularity for the liberal parties, which oftentimes benefit when people are angry about austerity and neoliberalism and the like?
Well, they were the parties that were carrying out these exact policies.
So when I say liberal parties, I mean these were the parties carrying out the privatization, rapid privatization, and these were the parties sponsoring the loan for shares and basically the theft of state property.
All at the same time, you know, Ordinary people didn't have savings because the Soviet economy was basically a non-money economy, and people lost their pensions.
There were serious hardships.
There was almost a generation of people that really had a significantly reduced standard of living.
And honestly, it's really under Putin that One of the reasons that Putin became popular is he really led Russia out of this era and sort of re-established some semblance of a more normal standard of living.
In the context of Russian politics, the reality is, There just isn't a strong liberal opposition.
There was Boris Nemtsov before.
Again, he was a pretty popular figure, but it's still fairly marginal.
I mean, Putin is extremely popular, even right now.
Even if they had free and fair elections, there's a very good chance he would win.
Now, of course, there's been a very, very heavy hand against other opposition leaders, but Alexei Navalny, even at the height of his popularity, he was relatively popular among urban, mostly younger people, educated people, urban people who were better off.
He had very, very little following in Russia's rural areas, which are dominant.
Vladimir Putin carries the rural regions of Russia, the less educated population.
But even Alexei Navalny, as you started to indicate, he's not really a liberal in the sense that we would understand in the West.
He was an ethno-nationalist.
In the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, Alexei Navalny went far More extreme than Vladimir Putin did at the time.
At the time, this was one of the first Russian wars where the people in the West were outraged that Russia was invading another country.
Alexei Navalny at the time, if I remember, actually called for the expulsion of Georgian citizens from the Russian Federation.
And Vladimir Putin is, by comparison, much more of a pluralist, especially at that time.
I think he's less so now.
And I don't mean to certainly don't want to sound like I'm defending Vladimir Putin, but I think within the context of Russian politics, the liberal parties or the pro-Western parties have done a lot to undermine themselves.
I will say, you know, just I do want to add just for the sake of Some balance here.
I mean, Alexei Navalny, I think he was, he was, he was not the, he's not the kind of hero that he's made out to be in the West.
But I do think the guy had a lot of guts.
Absolutely.
Oh, for sure.
I mean, he went back to Russia knowing what his fate was likely to be.
And there's no taking that away from him.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I don't want to... No, no, for sure, for sure.
I just wanted to get it, you know, I think everyone can recognize that and I think it, you know, it is impressive.
I think when people sacrifice for a cause, independent of what you think of their cause, you have to admire that just like on a kind of personal level.
That level of physical and moral courage I think is rare, but I think also it's important to distinguish Propaganda from reality.
I mean, just in general, that's a good thing to do.
Let me ask you one last question.
I could ask questions for a lot longer than that and we'd love to have you back on.
Obviously, Russia is a very important country, more so than ever, to the United States because of how much focus there is on it, the attempt to blame it.
Let me ask you about the last couple of decades of the U.S.
or the Russian-Western relationship, the Russian-U.S.
relationship.
Putin loves to emphasize, and he did so again in this recent interview that he did with Tucker Carlson, that there was parts of the history between the U.S.
and Russia where he thought that the Russians could actually integrate into the West, almost to the point of even joining NATO.
Maybe that wasn't really a serious proposal, kind of just more symbolic.
But certainly, if you listen to the statements of U.S.
presidents, starting with Clinton, going to Bush, who famously said he looked into the eyes and the soul of Vladimir Putin and think he's a good person.
Obama talked a lot about how he didn't want to confront Russia.
He thought there were ways that the U.S.
and the Russians could work together in places like Syria where they had common enemies and play in facilitating the Iran deal.
He certainly didn't want to confront Putin over Ukraine or Syria.
He didn't think it was worth it.
Obviously, Trump ran on a platform of federal relations with Russia.
How much of an opportunity was there really that has been just squandered by whichever side you want to assign the most blame to, but how much of an opportunity was there really from the perspective of Putin and the willingness and inclination of Putin to have much more constructive relationships with the United States and the West than Russia ended up having?
Yeah, that's a great question and there's plenty of blame to go around.
I think One very important episode that is not well appreciated, understood in the United States is that after September 11th, Russia and the United States had entered a rocky patch in the late 1990s with the NATO bombing of Serbia, which was a Russian ally.
And of course, the fact that that bombing was carried out by NATO, which Russia saw as an anti-Russian force in an offensive military campaign made Russia very unhappy.
But after September 11th, Vladimir Putin He was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush and they had already had a very good relationship and they, from many accounts, there's a book by Peter Baker that documents a lot of this, they really were like looking toward cooperating in this post 9-11 world because Russia had all these concerns about terrorism in Chechnya.
Now the United States is going to be focusing on Afghanistan.
And there was a lot in common, a lot of security interests in common.
And this was based, you know, Vladimir Putin was talking about the US-Soviet alliance during World War II.
That's sort of like what some of the thinking was.
And he actually offered George W. Bush He offered to help him establish U.S.
military bases in Central Asia, which was a part of the Soviet Union.
I'm talking about post-Soviet Central Asia and Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, areas where the United States basically had no relations at all, almost no influence.
They'd only been independent for a decade at that point.
And the US turned him down, actually.
And I think the reason for that had a lot to do with Cold War era mindset among the leaders of the American government at that time.
The George W. Bush cabinet was made up of a lot of Cold War hawks, they told Vladimir Putin, we'll establish military bases there.
We don't need your cooperation.
We don't want you to think that we have to rely on you to do it.
This is quite almost explicitly what they said.
And really pushed him to the side and made a very forceful effort to sort of establish bases there without Putin's approval or support.
This was on top of, at that time, the United States advancing its missile defense program, which meant eliminating the anti-ballistic missile treaty, which the United States basically tore up unilaterally in, I think, the same year, 2001.
And all these other measures that really were Very difficult for the Russians to accept, I mean, on top of NATO expansion happening simultaneously.
So I can't, you know, I don't know that I could explain why the United States took these positions other than some combination of Cold War era hawkishness among the foreign policy establishment, and also a neoconservative sort of, there was that famous idea of the
unipolar moment that because Russia was kind of down, the United States had this opportunity to remake the entire world and establish itself as the only significant power while it's had the opportunity to do so.
And I really think the United States bears more of the responsibility for no other reason than it was the more powerful actor and could have made concessions to Russia if in the interest of having a more fruitful partnership.
And it just, you know, obviously has not gone in that direction.
You know, Stephen Cohen, the famous historian, has been, well, he's passed away now, but he was saying, even I think as early as 2008, that there was a new Cold War.
And I was very appreciative.
I think that's very clearly the case now.
I think nobody would disagree with that.
Absolutely.
Unfortunately, I think there's no denying that.
Well, this has been super interesting.
The relationship between the United States and Russia is a very rich history.
Obviously, Russian history and its current political dynamic is something that, like I said, I think does take sometimes talking to people who are able to immerse themselves in scholarship, studying it because we Great.
Thanks for having me.
just in general, because they're so close to the US government, typically feeds messaging.
It's very hard to discern fact from fiction.
I think this interview has been super illuminating and helpful in trying to distinguish those two.
And I really appreciate your coming on and taking the time to talk to us about it tonight.
I think it really helped our understanding of these issues, and we appreciate it.
Great.
Thanks for having me.
I enjoyed it.
Absolutely.
Have a great evening.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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