Niall Ferguson V.S. Scott Horton: Did The U.S. Provoke The Ukraine War? | ZeroHedge Debate Special
In this special episode, presented by ZeroHedge, Scott Horton and Niall Ferguson debate: did the U.S. provoke the Ukraine War?
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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 exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
We have a special episode for you tonight of System Update.
We have a debate that is about the war in Ukraine and specifically what role the United States and NATO played in provoking The Russian invasion, the debate is between Scott Horton, who was previously on our show.
He's a longtime anti-war writer, somebody who has just written a book entitled Provoked about the Russian invasion.
Of Ukraine, that goes into detail the argument as to why many people around the world believe that the United States and NATO are responsible for the provocation about war.
And on the other side, we have Neil Ferguson, who is a well-known professor and a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Harvard.
He argues that the United States played no role in provoking the Russian invasion, whereas Scott Horton argues that it did.
It was originally filmed and scheduled for Zero Hedge.
And we want to thank them and our friend, the show, Liam Cosgrove, for permission to show it to you tonight.
We found it to be a particularly provocative and revealing debate about an issue that we have long covered.
And while I have you, we're about to show you that, but tomorrow night, we won't have a normal show either.
I'll be participating in the debate that originally it was going to go to New York for.
It is about the question of presidential immunity, specifically whether or not the Supreme Court ruled correctly several months ago when it ruled that Donald Trump enjoys presidential immunity, as do all U.S. presidents, for any acts undertaken as part of his presidential powers.
I'm arguing against that proposition, that it's actually quite damaging, to allow this form of presidential immunity We will be debating Elizabeth Price Foley, who is a law professor at the University of Florida in Miami.
I will be arguing against that.
You'll be able to watch that tomorrow night at 6.30 p.m.
Eastern on the link on the description.
So that will be for tomorrow night.
In lieu of our normal show here, we will have the link for you.
To watch the debate on the question of whether or not presidents should be immunized from power.
And here is from prosecution for anything they do in office that's part of their presidential power, even if it's a crime.
And here is the debate between Scott Horton and Yael Ferguson from Zero Hedge on the question of whether or not the war in Ukraine was provoked.
Enjoy.
Welcome to the Zero Hedge Debate sponsored by JM Bullion.
I'm Peter Robinson, the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
For the next 60 minutes, I will be moderating this debate, or at least strongly felt conversation.
The director of the Libertarian Institute, Scott Horton, is a radio host and author.
Scott's most recent book published this year, Provoked.
How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine.
Scott, welcome.
Thank you very much.
Great.
Neil Ferguson is a historian and author and, like me, a fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Neil's most recent book, published in 2021, Doom!
The Politics of Catastrophe.
Two Men with Catastrophe in your most recent titles.
This will be cheerful.
Neil is currently working on the second volume of his biography of Henry Kissinger.
I should note that as all the world learned when 60 Minutes aired this past Sunday, Neil is also a trustee at the new University of Austin in Texas.
Our format, the format I have in mind, object if you wish to, either of you right up at the top, is simple and conversational.
I'll ask one or the other of you a question, giving you plenty of time to reply.
Once one or the other has replied, the other...
Gets a chance to reply in turn, and then on to the next question.
You should feel completely free to talk to each other, ask each other questions.
If you start to talk over each other, I'll intercede.
Otherwise, I'll stay out of it.
Fair?
Very fair.
Very fair.
All right.
Three sentences of background.
In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, part of Ukraine.
Then in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, moving not just on Eastern Ukraine but bombing sites across the country and sending troops all the way to the capital city of Kyiv.
The invasion failed, but Russia has occupied about one-fifth of the territory of Ukraine, holding Crimea and much of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine.
Today, it seems to me fair to say that the conflict has settled into a war of attrition.
For Scott Horton, who started it?
Scott, you have condemned the invasion of Ukraine.
But as you argue in the title of your book, it was provoked.
I'll come in a moment to the detailed expansion of NATO step by step and have you take us through that.
But if you could give an overview statement of the ways in which you believe Russia was provoked.
Well, to go back to the way you originally stated who started it, the point is that American policy has made the answer to that question very complicated and not just clear cut.
So, of course, no one's denying that Putin and his men made a decision.
Putin himself and his men obeying him made a decision to escalate the war by 10,000% in February of 2022 with a massive invasion, as I say, a catastrophe for Ukraine since then.
So there's no question about what happened there.
And frankly, I don't think there's much question that Russian forces were involved in the civil war after it broke out in the summer of 2014 and a little bit later in early 2015. But now, as you expanded the question, the antecedents, right?
And this is what the great historian Robert Higgs said about World War II, is they always truncate the antecedents.
So my job is going back and elongating them.
So the book starts with H.W. Bush and the end of the last Cold War.
And before Bill Clinton ever came to town, the plan always was to expand NATO at Russia's expense.
But to lie to them, to tell them that we're not going to expand NATO, or if we do, it won't matter because NATO won't be a military alliance anymore.
It'll be a political organization.
We're going to create a new partnership for peace.
And you and Ukraine will be in it.
So Ukraine will be neutral and Russia will be a full partner because there's no threat.
We don't need an alliance.
All we need is a security partnership arrangement.
And we'll have a common European home and everything will be fine.
But they were lying all along.
They knew that that was not the plan.
The plan was always to use the CSCE and the Partnership for Peace as a halfway house, essentially, toward NATO membership.
They knew they had to essentially shine Yeltsin on, Gorbachev and then Yeltsin on.
But when you say they knew, you're talking about successive American administrations, correct?
Well, even in the H.W. Bush administration, they began knowing that they would have to let the Russians believe...
That we, as Bush's solemn promise, we will not take advantage of your withdrawal from Eastern Europe.
Could I pause you there?
I'll come right back to you because this detailed history, each administration successively expanding NATO, we have to go into that.
I'll return to you.
But Neil, Scott has given us his theme.
What's yours?
Well, let's just dismiss the notion that there was a promise not to enlarge NATO, shall we?
This originates in a conversation that Jim Baker had with Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And in that conversation, Baker asked, would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no US forces, or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO? With assurances that NATO's jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position, Baker's words.
Gorbachev said that he would prefer the latter, Baker seemed to agree.
But when he went back to D.C., Secretary Baker was given an earful by President George H.W. Bush, who said, to hell with that.
We prevailed and they didn't.
We can't let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.
And that was the end of not one inch.
So when Putin, as he repeatedly has claimed, says that there was a promise, that isn't actually good history.
If I may finish, it was something that Baker discussed with Gorbachev, but never became The policy of the Bush administration because Bush never for one second countenanced it.
Secondly, and this is the thing that people like Scott tend to miss, there are other actors in the drama besides Russia and the United States.
The former Warsaw Pact members and Soviet republics had an interest and agency too, and they wanted to be in NATO.
They did not want some alternative security arrangement for the very good reason that they understood, Lech Wałęsa, for example, the Polish leader, that anything less than NATO would not give them security. that anything less than NATO would not give them security.
So this is the reality, that the countries that joined NATO were not forced into it by the United States.
They wanted to join NATO, and the United States was not really in a position to decline their request.
There was, of course, a heated debate at the time.
There were those, George Kennan, for example, who argued that NATO enlargement was a mistake.
But it was the policy of the U.S. government of successive presidents beginning with George H.W. Bush, and crucially to my mind, it was what the Central and East Europeans wanted.
Scott, back to you.
Could we...
So, can I address what you just said there real quick?
Yeah, of course, of course.
Sure.
Okay, so on the last point, no one ever argued that America forced the Eastern European countries to join.
Of course they wanted to join.
The question was, why would America...
Do what they wanted instead of what was good for America's national interest, which was, as Kennan and Buchanan and so many others warned at the time, was making sure that our relationship with Moscow was copacetic.
Who cares about Warsaw?
What matters is that we get along with the Russians.
For the long-term.
And they're sacrificing that much more important long-term good for the short-term interests, including what the Eastern European nations wanted.
But on the previous point, pardon me, but that is just bad history.
Yes, you're right about the one meeting between Baker and Gorbachev on February the 9th.
But there were numerous meetings, and I demonstrate this in my book.
I have 7,800 citations, and including hundreds on this topic.
Where this all began in Malta, when H.W. Bush promised, Gorbachev himself the president promised, we will not take advantage of your withdrawal at all.
That was it.
And Jack Matlock, the second-to-last ambassador to the USSR, has explained that, including personally to me, that that was all-encompassing.
And you mentioned others involved.
How about Gensher?
How about Robert Gates made the same promise to the head of the KGB, The same day that Baker was making that offer to Gorbachev.
And how about the fact that Genscher, who was the foreign minister of Germany, West Germany, just as much a partner in all this, repeatedly vowed that NATO would not expand not only into eastern Germany, but to any nation east of Germany either.
And in the final treaty that they did sign, What they did was they came up with, because you're right, that Bush said that Baker's plan made no sense.
How can you bring Germany into NATO, reunify Germany, but not have East Germany into NATO? Even just as a sentence, it doesn't make sense.
So what they decided was, of course, East Germany will be part of NATO, but we promise not to expand any of our military presence into the former GDR.
Now, if the deal always was that, of course, we can bring Poland and the Baltics into NATO next and put bases there, then why would it matter if we were allowed to put troops in eastern Germany?
The entire and pardon me, one more thing, the entire discussion, and this is shown by scholars like Schifrinson and Surratt and others, it was the promises that Gensher and Baker made to Gorbachev that it was based on those promises that he it was the promises that Gensher and Baker made to Gorbachev that it was It was...
And Mary Elise Surratt proves this better than anyone in her book, Not One Inch.
As soon as he said, well, of course, I guess that's up to you, they pounced.
Didn't matter that it wasn't in a treaty.
It was just his spoken word that said, okay, I guess we'll allow reunification.
And they went for it.
And it was based on these solemn vows that we will not take advantage.
And again, they lied.
And they said repeatedly that they're going to turn NATO into a political organization, sort of like the EU plus America.
But we're going to replace it as a military institution with the CSCE and later the Partnership for Peace.
And that was to deceive under Bush and under Bill Clinton.
They said that to the Russians to get them to acquiesce when they knew all along the plan was to expand the military alliance right up to their border.
That's the real history of what happened there, sir.
Okay, boys, we spent 10 minutes on this first question, but on the other hand, the first question is a tremendously important one.
Conversations took place at a minimum.
Scott has laid this out.
Neil has readily grants the conversation between James Baker and Gorbachev, saying not one inch eastward.
So, Neil, if the United States...
There are two questions, honestly.
Scott, if we were lying, why were we lying?
Why were we acting in other than our interests?
What motive do you ascribe?
But you get to that second.
First, I want to come to Neil.
Neil, did we intentionally mislead or even inadvertently mislead Gorbachev and then Yeltsin?
Well, there was a succession of conversations.
No commitment was ever made not to expand NATO. And indeed, when the issue came up during Boris Yeltsin's presidency, President Clinton explicitly said that the inclusion of Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania, the Baltic former Soviet republics, Would be something that Russia would be compensated for with membership of Western institutions, including the Group of Seven.
So there was nothing mendacious or secretive about what was being discussed.
What year was that?
This was in the mid 1990s.
And in that conversation, as in all the conversations that are relevant here, which, as you say, Mary Sorotti describes in her book, While there was a debate within Washington and a debate within Europe about the wisdom of including the East European countries in NATO, there was never any binding commitment on the part of the United States not to do it.
And I think, in a sense, this is all somewhat beside the point.
Because ultimately, NATO enlargement, as it unfolded, was not strongly resisted by Russia until the issues of Georgia and Ukraine arose, which is much later at the 2008 NATO conference in Bucharest.
So we kind of don't want to waste too much time on the parts of NATO enlargement that the Russians didn't seriously contest, because those enlargements were not the cause or origin of the war.
Even in Russian propaganda, we're not dealing with the war in Eastern Europe now because Lithuania Latvia and Estonia joined NATO. The reason that there's a war in Eastern Europe now is that the Russians claim that the inclusion of Ukraine in NATO was a casus belli.
So, Neil, let me put a similar question but different.
Since the war in Ukraine began, these are the latest statistics I was able to find scouring the web, the Russians have lost 120,000 dead and half a million wounded.
And according to a spokesman for the American Defense Department, quote, Russian losses in just the first year of the war exceeded the total of all Soviet losses since the Second World War combined.
What was Putin, what is Putin thinking?
Make his motives, make this action comprehensible to us.
What does he think he's doing?
Well, first of all, it's simply not the case that all of these Russian soldiers lost their lives, to say nothing of the many Ukrainians the Russians have killed.
We don't know exactly how many, but it's certainly in the tens and possibly hundreds of thousands.
Did not die because of NATO enlargement.
Let's be clear about that.
Because that's a red herring and it's, I think, an integral part of Russian propaganda.
We should be skeptical of that argument.
The reasons...
If you'll let me finish.
Everything you say is CIA propaganda, then, if the other side of the story is all Russian propaganda.
Scott, I'll come back to you, Scott.
It's such a cheap shot.
I'm so sick of this.
Every time, when I was right about Iraq and you were wrong about Iraq, that was Saddam Hussein's propaganda that I was repeating, and that was MI6 and CIA propaganda that you were repeating.
Who was right about that one, Niall?
It's pronounced Neil.
It's Neil.
Okay, whatever.
The question was...
Scott, I'll come back to this.
Go ahead, go ahead, Neil.
I was repeating Saddam Hussein's propaganda in 2003.
We should do this.
We're on Ukraine.
We're on Ukraine.
And Neil's talking.
Go ahead, Neil.
If you could let me try to answer the question that Peter put...
Putin regarded Ukraine...
Talk faster, you're wasting time.
Perhaps you could learn some manners, Scott, and we could get further.
Putin regarded a democratic, independent Ukraine, and Ukraine had been recognized as an independent state since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 as a major threat to his regime.
Why?
Because a Ukraine as successful as Poland would be an advertisement that there was an alternative way to the way that he intended to lead Russia, the Russian Federation, after he came to power.
And there was a military dimension to the threat too.
In 2014, Putin snuffed out a nationalist uprising against a corrupt president in Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and created mini puppet states in the Donbas.
The problem with this operation was that it created an unsustainable position from a Russian perspective.
Crimea wasn't secure.
There were no good communications to Crimea.
It was subject to blockade by the Ukrainians.
And crucially, despite the weakness of the Western response to Putin's violation of Ukraine's sovereignty, Ukraine's response in the subsequent 10 years was a rapid rearmament and improvement of its own military capabilities.
By the end of 2020, it was clear that Ukraine was soon going to be able to pose a decisive military threat to the puppet states in Donbas, and potentially also a threat to Russia's Black Sea Fleet and Russia itself.
And so, not only for political reasons, but also for military reasons, Putin came to the conclusion that he had to act.
In order to prepare the ground for his aggression, he published an article on the historic unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, a farraga of lies and misrepresentations designed to legitimize the annexation.
Western policymakers failed to understand how serious Putin was and did nothing to deter him.
Indeed, the arms shipments to Ukraine were reduced in 2021, sanctions were taken off the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and every signal was sent from Washington that Putin did not need to fear a military response if he took further aggressive action in Ukraine.
He did.
He thought it would be easy.
In February of 2022, he attempted a swift blitzkrieg-like operation that was designed to decapitate the Ukrainian state, overthrow Zelensky, and install the kind of pro-Russian government that had existed prior to 2014. And it failed.
It failed completely.
And it failed because the Ukrainian military really had improved sufficiently to repel this Russian aggression.
They defeated the Russians in the Battle of Kyiv, drove them back, and indeed by the fall of 2022, had Russian armies in full flight from outside Kharkiv and Kherson.
And that is what happened.
Scott, so the notion here is not that we The invasion of Ukraine took place not because we, the West, broadly speaking, or the United States provoked them, the Russians, but because we failed to deter them.
We indicated too much softness, not too much hardness.
Yeah, that's what they say.
And look, some of what he says is right, but it's a massive pile of lies by omission mostly.
Starting with anybody who says the truth about this or adds the additional context about this from anything but London and Washington's point of view is repeating the propaganda of the other side.
That's what they try to say about Syria and that's what they try to say about Libya.
And that's what they try to say about Iraq.
And that's what they try to say about Afghanistan.
You're just repeating the propaganda of the enemy.
And yet the dissidents were right about all of those.
And the people who were repeating the point of view of Washington and London have done nothing but create disaster after disaster after disaster.
So I'm not going to sit here and stand for Russia propaganda.
I got accusations of that.
I got 7,800 citations in my book.
Scott, Neil and I are not accusing you of repeating any propaganda.
We're asking what you think.
I'm granting that your book is a meticulous piece of work.
Go ahead.
The only citations of Russians talking in there is either Russian media exposing something about the Russian state or just directly conveying their statements because I'm saying here's what they said, not because I'm saying here's how you know it's true because they said it.
I'm saying here's an example of a claim that they made.
Otherwise, there's no Russian propaganda in any of my arguments.
As he said, I'm not accusing you of that.
I'm asking you, why did Putin go in when he did?
Yeah, I know.
But I'm refuting his false accusation that the other side of the story is somehow falling for the lies or repeating the lies of the Russians when it has nothing to do with our conversation here.
Now that I'm done refuting that, I want to go back to your previous question about why they lied in the 1990s.
In 1990, it was because the Soviet Union still existed and they still had troops in Eastern Europe.
The USSR did not finally fall until Christmas 1991. And so, of course, they had to tell the Russians what they needed to hear to get them out of the way, to get them to acquiesce.
And they continued to lie.
One of the greatest examples of this, you can read up Brookings by James Goldgeier, wrote all about this, was Warren Christopher in 1993. Went to Moscow and lied right to Yeltsin's face.
Told him again, we're going to do...
This is when they replaced the CSCE with the Partnership for Peace.
And said, we're going to do the Partnership for Peace.
And you and Ukraine will be equal partners in it.
So in other words, Ukraine's neutrality will be guaranteed.
There won't be a fight over Ukraine.
We'll all be partners together.
And Yeltsin said, this is the greatest stroke of brilliance.
Tell Bill, I'm so enthused, etc., etc.
And then he come to find out In the beginning of 94, that Clinton announced that, psych, we didn't mean that, we're actually going to expand NATO at your expense anyway.
And yes, they did grouse and complain all through the 1990s, including, you notice he just skipped 1999, when they did the first round and brought the first three nations into NATO. They launched the aggressive war against Serbia the same week, or two weeks later, and proving that it's not just a defensive alliance.
And the Russians went completely crazy.
And all of America's best friends in the Russian establishment, people like Chubayas and Gaidar and all those who'd been friends with Clinton and Gore, they said this is the worst thing that you could do.
You're destroying the entire new warm relationship that we created, and we have no reason to do this.
And he cited George Kennan, but let me add here, pardon me, I'm trying to talk fast for you here, but listen.
Let me read George Kennan.
You both mentioned it.
Let me finish it real quick.
Two-thirds, sir, two-thirds supermajority of the population of the Council on Foreign Relations was against NATO expansion.
Okay?
The entire population of the American Embassy in Moscow was against it.
The experts were against it.
The very few powerful wonks and politically connected interests in the Clinton government overrode them and decided to do it anyway.
George Kennan.
It wasn't just Kennan and Pat Buchanan.
It was many, many, including Paul Nitza and Robert McNamara and William Perry, the sitting Secretary of Defense at the time, so that they should not do this.
And for one reason, because it'll unnecessarily provoke the Russians.
They said the same thing in 2004 with the second round.
Why did you do it?
In other words, if the argument was clear that it was against our own interest to expand NATO, what was the motive?
Well, it's public choice theory, right?
It's some interests are satisfied.
So one of the things that was a very big, two of the things that were extremely important, and this is all from the New York Times.
This isn't conspiracy theory stuff, okay?
This is pure just journalism out there.
You can find it.
I have all the footnotes.
It was the major incentives pushing for it were Lockheed dollars and Polish votes.
And the Republicans were attacking the Democrats for being weak on it.
And they said, we're going to corner the Republicans on this issue in Illinois and Pennsylvania, where there are a lot of Eastern European Americans whose votes they wanted to get.
And Bruce Jackson from Lockheed launched the committee to expand NATO and spent millions of dollars lobbying and whining and dining policymakers And Eastern European leaders to get everybody all on board to build a consensus for this thing.
Because simply his job was getting rid of fighter jets at American taxpayer expense.
And again, there are books about this.
There's a great article by Richard Cummings about it.
And you can read about it in the New York Times.
Bruce Jackson, Lockheed, NATO expansion.
It's in the New York Times.
This is what the incentives were.
It's called public choice theory.
It means there's no national interest.
There's just the individual interests of the men in charge.
And in this case, we're talking about William Jefferson Clinton.
And his men.
And they were terrible men and they made terrible decisions.
Now, we had to skip, and I know it's a long, complicated subject, but we skipped all the way to 22 and the current war, but just barely touching on 2014. And of course, skipping, completely omitting the fact that America, for the second time in 10 years, Spent tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars supporting a phony revolution against the elected government in Ukraine.
Take a moment to explain what you mean, Scott.
For our listeners, what took place in 2014?
The revolution or the...
The coup, according to some, revolution, according to others.
Take a moment to explain that, would you please?
Well, it was essentially a street putsch.
It wasn't exactly a coup like the general overthrew him and replaced him, but it was a right-wing putsch in the street led by the descendants of those who served Hitler in the war, in the OUN, in World War II. The direct descendants, I demonstrate this, don't shake your head, I demonstrate this with absolute hard facts and the best Holocaust historians in my book.
Who was overthrown and by whom was he replaced?
You can't compute it.
That's exactly who they were, was the right sector and the Svoboda party are the direct descendants of those who served the SS in the Second World War.
And they were the ones who led the push on American dollars to force.
And by the way, let me say this.
I think it's so important.
People said that Paul Manafort was Russia's agent controlling Trump.
And before that, that he was Russia's agent working with Yanukovych.
But he was, in fact, representing America's interests because Yanukovych was not so pro-Russian.
Yanukovych wanted to sign the association agreement with the European Union, and Manafort's entire job working for him was trying to help him accomplish that.
There's an excellent interview of Manafort, who I would disagree with about this stuff.
You can watch this great interview with him, with Patrick Bet-David, Where he explains all this and what happened was, and even Henry Kissinger, who you're writing a biography about, you might look this up, it's in The Guardian.
Henry Kissinger said it was all Angela Merkel's fault because she played too hard of hardball.
She wasn't willing to give easy enough loan terms, she was demanding too much austerity, and she, according to Henry Kissinger, was the one who ruined the deal.
The argument is that in 2014, a pro-Russian leader of Ukraine was overthrown by right-wing interests in Ukraine, or the United States funding and cooperating with right-wing interests in Ukraine.
They overthrow a more or less pro-Russian leader of Ukraine and replace him with a pro-Western leader of Ukraine.
That's the argument about 2014?
Well, that's what I'm saying.
This is what happened in the end of 2013 that got it kicked off, was he refused to sign this EU deal.
I stated that correctly.
Yes, that's right.
Quickly, 2014, Neil.
Well, let me add one sentence to the way you sum that up, okay?
Which is, after the putsch was successful, all former Ukrainian presidents signed a letter.
Kravchuk, Kuchma, and Yushchenko all signed a letter saying, we must now just repeal the Kharkiv Pact and kick Russia out of the Sevastopol naval base.
On the Crimean Peninsula.
Only then did Russia, did Putin order his sailors and marines to seize that peninsula in the coup de main.
Neil.
By the way, boys, I'm going to insist on coming to the present next.
We're now in 2014. We're going to jump to 2024. Neil, go ahead.
Part of the problem with Scott Horton's argument is that the counterfactual lacks plausibility.
Are you arguing that it would have been better for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe that they didn't join NATO in the period of NATO enlargement?
Would they have been more secure outside NATO? The striking thing about Ukraine's fate is precisely that it happened when it was outside NATO. It was the fact that it wasn't protected by Article 5 that left it vulnerable to Russian aggression.
So one obvious lesson of NATO enlargement is that it certainly benefited those countries that were fortunate enough to become NATO members.
Ukraine's problem...
You're begging the question.
You're assuming that there was a threat to them at all.
You could let me finish.
Neil, have a moment.
One of the obvious problems about Ukraine's situation was that it was offered NATO membership, a path to NATO membership after 2008, but that was never sincerely intended.
Leaving Ukraine and Georgia in a kind of limbo with some possibility no notionally of NATO membership, but no longer view that it's happening.
And of course, both countries subsequently were the victims of Russian military aggression.
So the first and obvious point is that if you're not in NATO, you're far more likely to be the subject of Russian military aggression than if you are in NATO.
QED, it was eminently sensible for the Czechs, for the Poles, for the Baltic states to join NATO.
And the counterfactual of a US policy that wouldn't have brought them into NATO is obviously a much less stable central and Eastern Europe.
Secondly, To hear Scott Horton defend the Yanukovych regime, one of the most corrupt regimes to have emerged since the collapse of communism.
I didn't defend the regime at all.
What are you talking about?
I did not defend the regime of corruption.
You argued, if I can finish, you argued that a Nazi revolution or putsch occurred against Yanukovych.
But Yanukovych was overthrown in a popular revolution against his egregiously corrupt rule.
I wonder, Scott, have you ever been to Ukraine?
You see, it seems to me that that's one of the reasons that you're not really a terribly dependable authority on this subject.
Have you been to Russia?
Have you been to Russia?
You know what?
These are all red herring arguments.
No, I don't think they're red herring at all, because the difference between us, Scott, is that I'm talking about.
Is Connolly's and Rice still at Hoover?
Is Connolly's and Rice still at Hoover where you guys work at?
I've spoken with the people who were directly involved in Euromedar and in the revolution that overthrew Yankovic.
Oh, we have.
And I can assure you that they are not.
Including Dimitri Urash?
Did you interview Dimitri Urash?
And the claim that they are Nazis, Scott, is of course another part of Russian propaganda that you see on recycling in this conversation.
So I'm sorry, somebody who's been to neither Ukraine nor Russia is not in a terribly strong position no matter how many copies of the New York Times they've read.
That's ridiculous.
That's nothing but a red herring argument, as are all your arguments.
I didn't defend Yanukovych about corruption.
That wasn't addressed.
What I said was he wanted to move to the West.
He was not Russia's puppet.
That doesn't mean he was a good man.
He hired Manafort to help him move West, but the West botched the negotiations.
That's what I said.
No one but you heard me defend Yanukovych.
Isn't that funny?
Yeah.
Also, here's for a counterfactual.
Our current CIA director was the ambassador to Moscow in 2008 when he explicitly warned Condoleezza Rice not to give a membership action plan to Ukraine and Georgia.
And anyone can read it at WikiLeaks.
It's a famous memo.
It's called Nyet means nyet.
And it's by William Burns.
And he's saying to her, this is the brightest of red lines.
The Russians, everyone in Russia is agreed, he says.
He's not just talking to Lavrov.
He's talking to everybody at all the think tanks and all the experts.
And they're all saying this is going to cause a war.
Lavrov said, if you bring Ukraine into NATO, it could cause a civil war.
This is our current CIA director.
Who failed to prevent this, said, the Russians said, if you do this, it could cause a civil war in Ukraine, and which would be a situation that they would be forced to make a choice whether to intervene.
They do not want that.
It wasn't a civil war that happened in Ukraine.
It was an invasion by a neighboring country, which is a slightly different thing.
She ignored his advice.
And she gave a membership action plan, or a half-assed one, because the Germans and French did everything they could to try to stop her and Bush.
So they compromised and gave this halfway offer, as you said.
But it's such a circular argument, question-begging argument, to say that, oh, if only we just brought Ukraine into NATO first.
We would have just not had a problem.
No, Russia just would have invaded them then.
Because I'm telling you, and this is in the book, I cite this, I got more footnotes than you've ever seen in your life, and direct quotations from American experts from the 1990s through the 2000s, through the 2010s, and into the 1920s, including your beloved Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski and all of the very top graybeards, saying that, and including Ken Pollack, who Who helped you lie into war with Iraq back 20 years ago.
They all said Ukraine itself is the absolute touchiest of issues.
The most neuralgic issue is what Burns said.
Because there is a massive ethnic Russian population in the East.
It used to belong to Russia in a way that Latvia and Estonia never truly did.
They were like occupied imperial possessions.
But they are a separate ethnicity and have a different history.
Whereas Novorossiya is so tied to Russian history, it's an extremely touchy subject, and it has been since independence.
And they all recognized that, and they all weren't against it.
And at various times, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Ken Polak, and all these other Council on Foreign Relations guys said, we ought to make a separate deal regarding Ukraine.
We ought to promise never to bring them into NATO. We ought to guarantee their permanent neutrality.
Kissinger wrote this in The Washington Post in 2014. And then that will avoid picking this fight.
Now you say, well, if only we'd given them a war guarantee earlier, there never would have been a fight.
But that's not true.
There just would have been a full-scale war earlier because the Russians were never going to accept that.
That's the fact.
Well, the reality, of course, Scott, is that the Russians were in no way able to go to war with NATO, and they've consistently avoided going to war with NATO for a very good reason.
They were entirely outmanned and outgunned by NATO, but they could go to war with Ukraine.
Now, let's grant that there was a meaningful debate about whether or not Ukraine should be offered NATO membership.
The same argument was made about Georgia.
And that debate went on within US policy circles before, during and after 2008. And as you rightly say, Henry Kissinger was one of those who was skeptical about the idea of making Ukraine a NATO member, though he later changed his mind about that.
And the reason he changed his mind was, of course, that Russia invaded Ukraine.
Now, I don't think anything that you've said so far has persuaded me, or I suspect anybody listening, that Russia was right and justified in launching a war of aggression.
Well, that's not my argument.
Well, it does sound a little bit like it.
No, that's ridiculous.
Again, you've done nothing but tilt at windmills this whole time.
You make up counterfactuals that I never said.
You make up quotes I never said.
You call me Russian propaganda.
Go ahead and actually argue with something I said or go home and take a nap.
So the question I'm asking you is, even granting that there were good arguments against Ukraine becoming a member of NATO. You sound like a little girl.
You have to go up in your reflection at the end of every sentence like that?
Scott, please let him ask a question.
Go ahead.
I'm showing as much patience as I can with a rather juvenile debater.
If you grant all of this, it doesn't make Russia's invasion of Ukraine legitimate any more than, say, Saddam's invasion of Kuwait was legitimate.
Unless you're going to argue that this was a justified invasion, what exactly is your position?
Were we wrong to resist it?
Were we wrong to support Ukraine in defending itself against invasion?
What's your position on that?
I don't understand.
Well, you know, you wrote this article in Bloomberg News, Putin and Biden misunderstand history in the Ukraine war that came out in March of 2022, where he said you quoted David Sanger from the New York Times and you also cited all your own sources.
And I'm paraphrasing here.
Anyone who's anyone in Washington and London knows that the goal here is to lock Russia into a long-term engagement in Ukraine at the expense of the people of Ukraine's lives in order to weaken Russia.
That's your great article.
We've all cited it so many times.
You wrote in here that prolonging the war runs the risk of not just leaving tens of thousands of Ukrainians dead and millions homeless, but also of handing Putin something that he can plausibly present at home as victory.
Betting on a Russian revolution, which is what they were saying, yeah, we're going to win this war and it's going to weaken Russia and his government's going to fall.
And you said, betting on a Russian revolution is betting on an exceedingly rare event.
Even if the war continues to go badly for Putin, if the war turns in his favor, there will be no palace coup.
And so you were cautioning against extending the war.
You explained in here, you said, this explains why Joe Biden is so quick to level the accusation that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, meaning to preclude the chance of peace negotiations, to Prevent peace from taking place, isn't that right?
This doesn't change anything about the question I asked you, which is, do you think we were wrong to support Ukraine in its war of self-defense?
I'm just agreeing with you, agreeing with me here, that of course it was wrong.
You're diametrically opposed to me.
You just explained that this isn't a war of self-defense, it's a war of America bogging down Russia to weaken and break Russia.
You're the source for it, sir.
What are you talking about?
It has nothing to do with defending Ukraine.
But the point I made in that article, which was you say, was published early in the war, was that the war should be ended as soon as possible in the circumstances that were favorable to Ukraine in 2022. But this doesn't alter the question that I'm asking you.
Are we wrong to have supported Ukraine in its war for its independence against Russian aggression?
Well, you're assuming the premise that history begins on the 24th when the Russian tanks roll in, and then what should we do then?
But why do you get to frame it that way?
Usually, invasions do have a date, and we all know the date when the Russians invaded Ukraine.
Are you arguing that we should simply have let them roll over I'm arguing that Joe Biden should have engaged in diplomacy throughout the year 2021 and into 2022 instead of the policy that they adopted, which was to warn Russia, you better not.
But not to engage in any official real diplomacy to try to end the war.
He refused to negotiate even the potential of neutrality for Ukraine.
They have this concept.
It's just jargon.
It doesn't mean anything.
It's called the open door.
And that means that if a country wants to join NATO, that's between them and NATO, and no other nation's interests can ever, ever, ever be taken into account, no matter what.
And so even though, and I agree with something you said earlier in the debate, where you said they never truly intended to bring Ukraine into NATO. In other words, a real war guarantee.
But what they did do, Was arm them up.
You talked about Ukraine arming up like it happened magically or they did it themselves.
It was the Obama and the Trump governments and then the Biden governments that armed them up.
And I'm so glad that you brought that up because you're right, that it was not enough to deter Russia.
And in fact, at the beginning of the war, a great journalist named Zach Dorfman, who wrote this in-depth series about the CIA in Ukraine for Yahoo News, he quoted CIA officers.
Who were in charge of importing those weapons from the United States into Ukraine in the, I'm not sure, but at least late Trump and into the Biden years.
Pardon me.
Wait, wait, just because I stopped the drink of Dr. Pepper doesn't mean you get to jump in here.
These CIA officers told Zach Dorfman that they warned their bosses to warn the politicians that you have miscalibrated By pouring these weapons in, it's not enough to deter Russia, but it is enough to provoke them.
It's enough to make them feel like it's now or never, which is what you said.
That was why Russia invaded, because Ukraine was building up and it was now or never.
But it was America that was building them up and putting them in the situation where it was now or never.
And that's why you omitted that part of it, is it was foreign intervention that made it that way.
We've spent now three-fifths of our time on antecedents before the war.
The Russians invaded in February of 2022. Since then, the United States has given Ukraine $60 billion in military assistance.
These have to be round numbers, but these are the best I could find.
And over $100 billion in economic and humanitarian aid.
Too much or too little?
Scott?
Well, look, the whole thing should be called off immediately.
We need to negotiate.
The high watermark of Ukraine's effort here was in September of 2022, when they had their brilliant feint in Khursan.
They retook half a Khursan, and they retook essentially all of Kharkiv then.
It has been all downhill from there.
Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mullen, and the current, at that time, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley, both said, now's the time to negotiate while you're only this far behind.
The rest of the establishment, the White House and the media, they all said, no, no, no.
As much as it takes for as long as it takes until Ukraine is restored to 2013 borders, including Crimea and the rest, which was always an absolute pipe dream.
And by pursuing that, with the failed escalation of 2023 and the absolute grind of a war that's taken place in the Donbass, they've done nothing but lose territory since then.
And the Americans do nothing but insist that they lower their conscription age and lower the age at which they send new cannon fodder into battle to die in a losing war.
And people can dress this all up as virtue.
We can't abandon our friends and all these things.
But that was what they said about Afghanistan for 20 years.
We're backing this Afghan national government and its army, the Tajik and Hazara and Uzbek coalition to keep the Pashtun Taliban out.
But it didn't work.
And we got hundreds of thousands of people killed and in the end lost the war anyway.
And that's the same thing that we're doing here.
It's the same thing that happened in Vietnam.
These attack on missiles aren't game changers against Russia.
And so I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but unless you're willing to actually lower the conscription age to 18 and do mass conscription and send them all to the front, which they're not willing to do because they're facing a terrible demographic crisis right now.
They're only setting middle-aged men to the front to fight.
They're not willing to risk their young men.
And Lindsey Graham demands that, no, lower the age.
Send younger and younger men over there to die in a war that they've already lost.
The question now, gentlemen, is whether the Russians are going to take Kharkiv and Odessa or whether we're going to be able to negotiate a peace before it gets that bad.
Neil, this is you in a recent interview.
I'm quoting you, Neil.
It's not very easy to see how Ukraine can get Russia out.
So it's important that we get an armistice, and the analogy I would use is with the Korean War, close quote.
Neil, could you explain yourself on that one?
Well, I argued from very early on, in fact, even from the first month of the war, that it might well be understood as the Korean War of our Cold War, the first hot war, really, that clarifies the true geopolitical lie of the land.
We got this far in the debate without anybody mentioning that Russia's war effort would not have been sustainable without large-scale economic support from China.
As well as weapons from Iran and now weapons and men from North Korea.
So an axis of sorts has formed in support of Russia's war effort.
And on the other side, Ukraine has been supported not only by the United States, but actually European Union countries have delivered more in financial terms, though not in military terms, to Ukraine than the United States.
So the parallel with the Korean War was that you have a year of very kinetic warfare and then something like attrition and stalemate.
And that's been to some extent true until really USAID was cut off, which caused a significant deterioration of Ukraine's position in that six month period.
Now, Scott, who likes getting hot under the collar, will be surprised.
Perhaps he's stopped reading my columns to realise that we agree that the war's prolongation after 2022 was a major error.
The Biden administration's made a succession of mistakes.
The first one was to fail to deter Putin in 2021. The second one was not to end the war in 2022. We don't disagree about that.
The issue really is whether the new Trump administration will be able to end the war when the balance of military advantage is clearly tilted in favor of Russia.
It's very hard to get people to negotiate and enter a war if one side is clearly winning.
And this is the legacy that the Biden administration has left.
to Donald Trump and his national security team.
As I go every year to Ukraine and therefore know the country rather better than Scott, I can assure you that the mood is extremely bleak in Kyiv right now, and it has been really for most of this year.
There's a great deal of bitterness that the Biden administration encouraged the 2023 counteroffensive, but didn't supply the wherewithal for it to succeed.
Peter, you asked, have we given too little or too much?
Correct.
Ukraine, the answer is very simple.
Too little for them to win.
Just enough for them not to lose, but now actually not even that much.
And in a desperate attempt to correct matters, restrictions are being lifted on the use of attackums and storm shadows, but it's too late because the potential targets were long ago moved by the Russians out of range.
So although Scott likes getting angry, actually we agree on this.
I think the Biden administration has bungled this and it's succumbed to the delusion that it was in American interest for the war to be prolonged.
Whereas I think Kissinger understood before his death that in any case of this sort, when there are very, very unequal competence, and remember, Russia's economic services are 11 times larger than Ukraine.
In those circumstances, you've got to get the war over as soon as you can, really.
And it should have been ended by negotiation in 2022. It's much harder now.
So, Neil, back to the North Korean analogy extremely briefly.
There's an armistice in Korea, and all these decades later, South Korea is a rich, democratic country.
It has never been able to reunify the country.
But if something like that happened in Ukraine, that is to say, there were a settlement, the Russians under the settlement keep Crimea and about a fifth of Ukraine proper, a fifth of non-Crimean Ukraine, and two decades from now, three decades from now, we look at Western Ukraine, including Kyiv, and say, here's a country that's prosperous, that's democratic.
That would be a victory.
Correct?
Correct.
It would be a victory by analogy with the Korean case.
But the nightmare scenario is that Ukraine ends up being South Vietnam, not South Korea.
In other words, it's not in a sufficiently strong state at the end of the peace negotiations to survive a second phase or, I suppose, third phase of Russian aggression.
And that will mean that a lot depends on what kind of security guarantees are provided to Ukraine.
I think it's highly unlikely that NATO membership will be the way that this is resolved.
I don't think the Trump administration has many members that think that way.
But it's still possible for Ukraine to have some of the kind of security guarantees that South Korea had.
After all, South Korea is not a member of NATO. This NATO issue we began with is important.
Peter, if I may just make one point.
Scott regards this as a sort of flashpoint and a major reason why war happened.
Finland, of course, is now a member of NATO, one of the unintended consequences of Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
And Finland is, in many ways, as big a problem from a Russian vantage point as Ukraine.
Scott, are you expecting Vladimir Putin to attack Finland next, now that it's been part of NATO enlargement?
Well, I certainly hope not.
It clearly could be construed as an offensive threat to them.
But you realize why it's happened, don't you?
And the reason is that it's a native member.
I can't hear you when you're trying to talk over me.
Are you going to put more words in my mouth?
Go ahead and try.
My point is just that the reason it won't happen is that Finland is a NATO member.
And Ukraine's problem, as I said before, was that it was never a NATO member.
And that's what made it vulnerable.
Anyway, wait a goddamn minute.
Listen, Russia never invaded Finland this whole time.
We just brought them into NATO last year.
We just brought them into NATO last year, and Putin said when America brought Finland in, they asked him, he said, listen, we're against this, and it does create new strategic problems for us.
On the other hand, we don't have an ongoing border dispute with Finland.
We don't have nearly as complicated politics in dealing with Finland as we have in Ukraine.
Ukraine is an entirely different issue.
In Finland, the danger is Western military forces being based there.
But there's no ongoing crisis as far as, for example, millions of ethnic Russians whose liberties are being threatened on the other side of the border, as was the extremely complicated and dangerous situation in Ukraine.
Just for the record, there was no threat to the rights of ethnic Russians in pre-war Ukraine.
That's not true.
That is not true.
That is not true.
And I document in the book the myriad ways in which the Russian language and Russian speakers were being persecuted, their language was being...
Why did the civilian population of eastern Ukraine not welcome the Russians then?
Why did they fight them?
I'm sorry, I'm not following you.
Well, there's no such thing as the people of Eastern Ukraine.
There are many people in Eastern Ukraine who absolutely did...
There are many dead people in Eastern Ukraine, thanks to your friends, the Russians.
Keith, my friends, the Russians.
You're pathetic.
Listen, Keith Gessen, my friend from the New York Times, was there and witnessed hundreds of thousands of people vote yes on independence in 2014. And it wasn't because he loves Russia.
It was because they felt that they were being attacked The staggering thing about this conversation is your almost total ignorance of Ukraine.
I'm really wondering why we're bothering having it.
What's amazing is you don't know anything about what I know about Ukraine.
And what's really amazing is that somebody like you...
Take a trip, Scott.
Take a trip.
Somebody who's been here at the war in Iraq, a British imperialist who said that we need to get 7,000 Americans killed in Iraq for your interest, is allowed to show his face in public and argue public policy anywhere, ever.
Scott, we're coming to the end.
I bodied your wife in front of everybody.
We have six minutes left.
Scott, question to you.
What kinds of guarantees?
Donald Trump has said again and again and again that he wants to end the war.
He even said at one point he would end it even before taking office.
It seems clear, although if you want to attack this premise, feel free, it seems clear, as I look at it, that the United States would have to engage in some offer of military...
Guarantees, economic guarantees to support, to make the Ukrainians feel that they could settle with the Russians.
To what extent should we be willing, should the Trump administration be willing to provide guarantees, economic and military guarantees to Ukraine?
Scott?
No.
Or to put it another way, how should Donald Trump settle this?
Well, Mr. Ferguson was right that the Russians are in a position of strength, which is going to make it very difficult for Trump and who has surrounded himself with hawks.
Marco Rubio is going to be the Secretary of State, for crying out loud.
So I don't know what luck they're going to have trying to resolve this.
There have been plenty of reasonable proposals put together by very distinguished gentlemen, far more credentialed than myself, that would say that they would have a permanent guarantee of neutrality in their constitution.
They would be allowed EU membership, but not NATO membership.
And I don't know what security guarantees European countries might be willing to give, but America should not give security guarantees to anyone.
You know, back 20 years ago in a debate with Robert Kagan at AEI, Mr. Ferguson said, well, if the American people can't afford The war in Iraq will just have to cut benefits for Medicaid and Medicare in order so that we can build up our military force.
And in fact, America is bankrupt.
And we have a Brit telling us we've got to cut our welfare programs for our elderly people so that we can afford militarism.
That war wasted between five and eight trillion dollars.
Now the national debt is 36 trillion.
The interest on the debt is two trillion dollars per year.
I'm talking to guys from the Hoover Institution.
Let me lecture you Scott, I'm asking you a question about what Donald Trump should do now.
We can't afford it.
If you want a world empire, you should get the British to go and invade the planet again.
Colossus, which argues clearly that the United States is not likely to be able to manage a world empire.
But my question for you, Mr. Horton, is should the United States have provided troops to South Korea Should it have provided military presence in post-war Japan?
Should the United States have contained the Soviet Union during the Cold War?
Was that also a mistake?
Always truncating the antecedents.
It was the South that started the Korean War with American help.
And this is documented.
I forgot, what's his name?
The great scholar of the Korean War.
I forget his name.
Chomsky changed his name to Scott Holden.
No, please.
You know, people can search at antiwar.com.
Justin Raimondo has the review of the historian's book.
I forget his name off the top of my head.
But it's the great historian of the Korean War who shows how America was supporting South Korean forces.
Just to reveal Stalin on the Korean War.
Authorized the invasion of South Korea.
Jesus.
Any serious historian of the Cold War will tell you that if you trouble to read their work.
Neil, this is you once again in that recent interview I quoted earlier.
I'm quoting you, Neil.
If we are to make sure that Putin is not only stopped in Ukraine, but stopped altogether, there has to be a real and serious effort by the European members of NATO to get not just to 2% of GDP that's on defense spending, but to 3.5%, close quote.
So...
An amendment of the question I've just asked Scott.
What should the Trump administration be willing to offer, so to speak, to get this settled?
But also, is there not an opening here for the Europeans to step up and provide us a way to shift our attention to China?
Scott said earlier that Trump has surrounded himself by...
I quote J.D. Vance in 2022, quoting J.D. Vance, I've got to be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.
Neil, what should Trump offer and what should the Europeans do?
It's worth adding that J.D. Vance, in a recent interview with the New York Times, changed his position and made the point that it would be quite wrong if Russia were allowed to take Ukraine.
Ukraine must, in fact, not be handed over to Russia.
So his position has shifted.
Clearly, the Europeans are at least a decade away from strategic autonomy.
It will take them a very long time to rebuild their eroded defenses and defense industrial complex.
The ultimate goal, and this is something that President Trump's long argued for, but he's not the first president to make the argument, must be for there to be meaningful burden sharing so that the costs of NATO are not disproportionately shouldered by American taxpayers.
That's long been my position.
And I think Donald Trump has already moved Europeans quite some way down that road.
But it would be wrong.
Indeed, it would be a delusion to imagine that the Europeans can provide sufficient deterrence in the short run to prevent a third Russian war of aggression against Ukraine at some point in the near future.
This isn't going to get settled, Peter, in the sense of there being a full peace agreement.
An armistice is, I think, the most likely outcome, a ceasefire.
And in that ceasefire, I think it's highly likely that Russia will remain in control of somewhat less than 20% of Ukrainian territory.
But I don't think the Ukrainians will be obliged to recognize that as a legitimate annexation, nor should they be.
Because the international order has to be based on something other than the kind of right of might that Scott Horton has in mind.
We can't let the invasion of Ukraine be acknowledged as legitimate any more than we could let the invasion of Kuwait be recognized as legitimate.
The United States will therefore have to help Ukraine with its defenses, just as it helps Israel and has long helped Israel with its defenses.
Otherwise, Ukraine, like Israel, will be menaced by superior hostile forces.
So this is a simple reality, and it's nothing to do with empire.
My book, Colossus, argued that America was not likely or able to run an empire, but it is the basis of American primacy.
And we must want American primacy to endure in Europe as well as in Asia.
The United States has to prioritize.
It faces a hostile axis of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
They threaten American interests in multiple locations.
The new Trump administration will prioritize, I feel sure, China over these other threats, because China is by far the biggest and most dangerous.
But he can't walk away from Ukraine, as Scott Horton seems to imply, because the complete collapse of Ukraine, victory for Putin's aggression, would be a very, very dark day for European and indeed for global security.
The question for you, Mr Horton, is who would be next?
We have quite some experience in European history, if you study it, of aggressive authoritarian regimes invading countries.
And if you do nothing, as we did, of course, in 1938-39, when it was the partition of Czechoslovakia that happened, What happens is not surprising.
They invade somewhere else.
And sooner or later, you do have the nightmare of World War III. So deterrence, peace through strength, is crucial to what the Trump administration has to do.
And that must include deterring Russia from any further aggression against Ukraine.
All right, a couple things here.
Mr. Robinson.
I just wanted to say we're pretty much, we're nearly out of time.
Closing statement, Scott.
Yes, sir.
I'll try to be quick here.
First of all, I have one correction.
I made an error in the heat of my argument there.
Mr. Ferguson and his friends got 4,000 Americans killed in Iraq, not seven.
Seven is from Iraq and Afghanistan, which I know he supported as well.
And it's funny that you say we should call it primacy, not empire, because in July of 2003, in your big debate with Robert Kagan at AEI, your entire point was that we should dispense with all the euphemisms like primacy and predominance and hegemony and just go ahead.
The American people must embrace empire.
It worked for the British.
It was fantastic.
And I'll be posting that.
And where you say the American people, they'll just have to take cuts to their elderly pension programs so that we can afford militarism in the Middle East and your giant failed progress in Mesopotamia.
I'll be posting that on my Twitter feed so everyone can read it.
Where 2003U is mocking 2024U for using euphemisms like primacy.
And in fact, you even say, I re-read it this morning, you even say in there, of course, George Bush shouldn't call it empire.
When we're addressing the public, we should always use these euphemisms.
But between you and me, Bob Kagan, we know what we're doing here.
Scott, you were talking about something that happened 20 years ago.
Could you give us a closing statement on the present?
I'm an American, and I truly resent...
I'm also an American, Scott.
I'm a U.S. citizen.
Oh, really?
You're going to call my nationality into question and my naturalization into question?
That's fun.
Well, everything out of your mouth is against America's interests, so I don't know why anyone would listen to you.
I don't think it's in America's interest to hand Ukraine to Russia, which is what you seem to want to do.
You thought it was a great idea for America to hand Baghdad over to Ayatollah Sistani, right?
Well, I mean, you can look at the Middle East and draw your own conclusions about how well American foreign policy works.
Yeah, exactly.
Anybody can.
Anyone can see what you did in Iraq.
You and your buddy Bobby.
Well, Jacqueline, you're reduced to talking about Iraq, tells me you've lost the debate on Ukraine.
No, I was just making a correction about how many people you killed there.
On the question of...
Closing statement on Ukraine, Scott, because we are out of time.
It's a rather small number by comparison with the number of Ukrainians Russian aggression has killed.
All of the...
There are 37 million people driven out of their homes by the terror wars.
At least 4 million people killed, according to the Cost of War project at Brown University.
You're absolutely wrong about that.
There's still war going on in Somalia and all across the Middle East.
And anyway, on the question of Ukraine, Mr. Robinson, you and the rest of your audience will notice that the Hawks never have any actual specific details about what they want to see happen.
They always resort to these slogans about, we just can't What do you want to see happen?
We cannot let Putin win.
But I'm asking, what's your plan?
Because the fact of the matter is, to drive Russian forces out of Ukraine would take American Navy and Marines and Army to drive them out.
Neil has already suggested his plan, which is an armistice for now.
Would that be acceptable to you?
Well, but he also says they cannot be allowed to win and they cannot be allowed to take what they've taken.
So which is it?
But the armistice doesn't give any formal recognition to the Soviets.
It simply puts off for possibly decades.
His analogy was Korea, which is...
You should hook it up.
Right.
So what is your plan, Scott?
Closing statement.
We are over time now.
Pardon me, then, for the mistake.
If you're truly saying that, no, the policy of trying to reverse what's happened in the invasion so far should be abandoned, then I agree with you about that.
As far as what security guarantees America should give to Ukraine after this, it should be none.
America should read Kiev the facts of life, which are, there's nothing more that can be done for you in this situation.
You guys need to come to peace.
Here's one thing America definitely could do for Zelensky, and that would be to provide him some Marine Corps bodyguards because he's surrounded.
And listen, this is important.
Nazis like Dmitry Yarosh and Andrei Perubi and Andrei Beletsky have threatened to murder Poroshenko and Zelensky repeatedly when they talk about trying to make peace.
Zelensky tried to implement the Minsk 2 deal in 2019, and they threatened to murder him.
Gentlemen, we're done.
And the New York Times said these are credible threats.
Scott, 60 seconds ago, I thought I heard a note of partial agreement.
I'm going to latch onto that to close out this conversation.
Scott Horton, thank you.
Neil Ferguson, thank you.
And to all our viewers, thank you for listening to the Zero Hedge debate sponsored by J.M. Bullion.
