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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:35
The Road to World War 3: Ukraine, Russia and American Imperialism
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Hi everybody, my name is Stefan Molyneux, I'm the host of Freedom Aid Radio and today we are going east to the fiery furnace of social revolution known as the Ukraine.
I have with me Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury for Economic Policy and Associate Editor under Reagan and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, Colonist for Businessweek, Scripps, Howard News Service and Creator Syndicate.
Thank you so much, Dr. Roberts, for taking the time today.
You're welcome.
All right, so the Ukraine appears to have precipitated itself into a crisis over, it seems roughly East versus West.
Do they want to join the EU or are they basically going to be bullied into maintaining trade relationships with Russia?
Now, I like, I mean, my sort of specialty is history, so I go kind of deep.
The Ukrainian history with Russia, particularly in the 1930s, was so brutal, and then there was the Nazi occupation from the West, and then there was the reoccupation by Russia.
I mean, how could they even be tempted to either of these, or is this simply a government initiative to cover overspending?
Well, Ukraine has really been part of Russia for 200 years.
The Ukrainians really haven't had any independence since, I think, the 14th century.
They belong to different people, Lithuania, Poland.
And the current Ukraine is really two separate countries.
During the Soviet era, the Soviet leadership added traditional parts of Russia to Ukraine.
The Crimea, Kharkov, the Donetsk Basin, I think they did this in order to Russify the Ukraine and increase the Russian population and to help weld it into the Soviet empire.
Now, of course, the Soviets didn't expect that the Union would collapse and that Ukraine would become independent.
And so it's held together so far because they You know, the United States tried to take the Ukraine over, I think, in 2004.
When was the Orange Revolution?
That was 2004, yeah.
So, Washington came close then.
It didn't work out.
And the current government is elected in a democratic election, and Ukraine is independent.
Now, there was pressure on the Ukraine from Washington and the EU to join the EU.
Essentially, the Western banks want to be sure they can loot the Ukraine, like they did Greece and Latvia and anywhere they can get a hold on.
And Washington wants NATO bases there because it's part of the drive for American world hegemony.
If they can have anti-ballistic missile bases in Ukraine, essentially they've downgraded the Russian strategic deterrent and removed Russia's ability to stand up to the US.
And that would only leave China.
So this is an orchestrated effort by the United States.
It's now well known.
The U.S.
Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, declared last December at the National Press Club that Washington had spent $5 billion aligning Ukraine with the West.
This, of course, a lot of this is through the so-called non-governmental organizations, which are essentially a fifth column for Washington.
And they've been active there for years, stirring up dissent and organizing groups.
They have various guises, various covers, human rights organizations, educational, teaching democracy, all of this sort of stuff.
So that's what happened.
When the president of Ukraine said no to joining the EU, Washington unleashed the protest.
And the Ukrainian government has been very hesitant to put the protests down the way they would be put down in the United States.
Or Greece or Spain or wherever.
And so they got out of hand and various more radical, ultra-nationalist groups managed to secure arms and the protests became violent.
And the moderate leaders of the protests, the Ukrainian moderates, were interviewed on television and said they had lost control.
And that's the simple fact they've lost control.
So what are the stakes?
Well, since Russia regards NATO bases in Ukraine as a serious strategic threat to the independence of Russia, They're not going to look with any favor toward that.
And since half of the country is Russian anyhow, and that half will simply secede from the Ukraine and go back to Russia where it has always been, because they certainly won't want to be part of the EU.
And the funny thing about it, The protesters are going on about, at least, the sincere ones, the university students, not the ones paid, bused in, and not these armed elements.
But the sincere ones are going on about independence, independence.
Well, of course, if you enter the EU, you don't have any independence, as Greece found out, Italy, Spain.
Who has independence?
Essentially, Germany.
And the UK, because they're not actually in it, they're in it, but they kept their own currency.
So they don't have, they're not subject to the financial hegemony or imperialism that the other countries are.
So it's very strange that these students who are so concerned about independence want to give it up to the EU.
So that's the solution.
Well, and of course, to the – sorry to interrupt, but for the strictures of the IMF.
The IMF recently gave $15 billion to the Ukrainian government contingent upon specific reforms, you know, opening up the country to more investment, which often means, as you say, multinational predation upon the natural resources, raising the price of natural gas, which is their chief export, by 40 percent, which in a cold country, of course, raising the price of natural gas, which is their chief export, by 40 So it seems that the requirements to get into EU were too much to be politically sustainable.
And of course, what was Russia offering was the $15 billion of aid that they needed through, you know, the buying of the bonds and through subsidies to the natural, sorry, to the resource that they would be selling to the Ukraine.
So it seems just like they ran out of money and Russia was offering and the EU was not offering and they went that way.
Right.
Well, it doesn't make any sense for them to go into the EU.
But what's most disturbing about all of this is here it shows Washington not having any real judgment because they don't mind bringing a strategic threat to a nuclear armed power.
And so what we're witnessing is this sort of great power confrontation possibility.
You know, isn't this some anniversary of World War I?
And where all the great powers just made all the most fantastic blunders and walked right into this war that destroyed all of them.
Russia was destroyed.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was destroyed.
Everything was destroyed.
All the ruling dynasties.
So that's what I think is the possibility we face now.
If the Americans keep, or Washington, if Washington keeps pushing this, it is a strategic threat to Russia.
And I don't know what Washington's response will be when half of the Ukraine simply breaks off.
What will they do?
So I think the prospect of there being a confrontation is high, and it would be a very dangerous one if it came to a military one.
I don't think the West could prevail in Russia's backyard with conventional... No, it would be a disaster to even try.
But I know that you come from the Republican side of the fence, but wouldn't it be fair to say that Democrats have a history of, I guess, charitably being put fumbling and creating significant and escalating disasters in terms of when they meddle with foreign policy, particularly when military strength is involved.
I think Democrats have a history.
of this kind of mismanagement and provocation followed by a lack of follow-through in military affairs.
Well, I think you're correct about that.
Of course, now it's worse because we have the neoconservatives and we have their ideology of U.S.
world hegemony.
So, it's a much worse situation than normal with the Democrats.
Because if you have an ideology of world hegemony, then you are prepared to take risks.
And Russia and China are the real checks on this hegemony.
So if you can neutralize Russia with missile bases on their border...
You only have to worry about China.
So I think this is a definite effort on the part of Washington.
We have the recorded conversation of the Assistant Secretary of State Nuland with the American ambassador in Ukraine, and it's clearly they've plotted a coup.
They've decided who they're going to put in power, how they're going to pull it off.
It's revealing.
It's not anything about joining the EU.
It's about taking over Ukraine.
And there's this grim repetition about this and this weird kind of Orwellian memory hole that this stuff gets into because now they're talking about funding a coup to oust the person that in 2004 they funded the coup to put in.
It's a sort of rotating door Saddam Hussein situation where yesterday's friend is tomorrow's enemy.
It's completely bizarre.
And you had a wonderful word, prestitutes, in your article.
Why is the press so dependent upon government handouts of information and control that they simply can't point any of this obvious stuff out that now the U.S.
is paying these protesters and there's no way the Ukrainian government can pay its protesters the equivalent of five billion dollars the U.S.
can sink into the situation.
Why is nobody talking about how orchestrated this all is?
Well it's like you say, if you're a news organization You have to have sources, and the government's a source, and so you can't poison that.
But it's even worse now, because remember, in the last years of the Clinton administration, the American media was concentrated in a few hands.
I think it's about five megacompanies now that own the whole print and TV media.
And these are huge conglomerates, and the value of the companies are the federal broadcast licenses.
So you can't afford to get on the wrong side of the government.
Moreover, these companies are no longer run by journalists.
They're run by corporate advertising executives and former government officials.
And so what they're focused on is advertising revenues and keeping their federal broadcast licenses.
And the editors know they can't get aggressive.
And so they have to restrain the reporters.
And reporters know the easiest thing to do is to have a government source.
Because you can always tell the editor, I have a source.
This is my source.
And so it functions as a propaganda mechanism.
The American media is now a ministry of propaganda.
And it doesn't they wouldn't touch any story that challenged the line coming out of Washington.
It is a strange situation because I'm old enough to remember when what's called isolationism, which to me is a very strange situation.
negative phrase, which is isolation, of course, is simply you don't meddle in military and political affairs overseas.
You can trade with everyone you want.
You can get involved with everyone you want at an economic and cultural and artistic and social level.
Go visit, go chat, go enjoy the dances of foreign countries.
But what is called isolationism, which to me is simply as sensible as if it's a terrible sea and you stay in your port completely.
You don't call yourself isolationist with regards to sailing.
You're just sensible.
And so this idea that the U.S.
is the world's policeman, that the U.S.
has a vested interest in every country and 700 plus military bases overseas.
I'm old enough to remember when this used to be something that would be debated.
And now it doesn't even show up.
I mean, unless Ron Paul pops up on the TV screen, it doesn't show up in any political debates whatsoever.
It is simply one of these things that is completely assumed, like it would be like questioning gravity.
How on earth did that come about?
It seems to be a pretty legitimate debate to be having.
Well, you know, several things brought it about, didn't it?
I mean, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was a major constraint on American hedge enemy power.
The corporations went global, transnational.
They want more territory to exploit and occupy economically.
And then we had the neoconservative ideology, which gives a driving force that America's function in the world is to turn it into America.
It's an empire.
And so, you know, we are, what are we declared to be?
The exceptional people, the indispensable country.
So it's almost, you know, it's like the French Revolution, only it's to be worldwide now.
You know, the French were only going to take their ideas to Europe, but the Americans have taken it to the whole world.
They've got to be, like us, the end of history.
We are at the end of history.
The world has to be modeled on us.
We have the right to impose our ways.
This is all the neoconservative doctrine.
And it's been active now through two terms of a Republican president and now two terms of a Democratic president.
And the neoconservatives are the ones who are in these These positions, that's who the assistant secretaries are, and the undersecretaries, and the National Security Council.
They're all, this Victoria Nuland is a neoconservative.
She's married to one of the most notorious neoconservatives, Kagan.
Susan Rice, the National Security Advisor to Obama, is a neoconservative.
So this is their agenda.
They see it as the way to knock Russia down, make it weaker.
Give it more problems.
Put it in a position where it has to acquiesce or make deals.
And this is removing the obstacle to American hegemony and to American domination economically as well as politically and militarily.
So this makes it extremely dangerous because it puts an ideological element in driving all of the usual normal self-interest.
So I think- Yeah, certainly if you- Morality tends to be the great exaggerator of the power play of politics and tends to make you forget consequences.
You know most of us are virtuous not because we fear consequences but for the happiness that comes from being virtuous itself and so consequences go out the window when a moral imperative comes by and some of this very risky, non-pragmatic, non-consequentialist, non-utilitarian stuff where you go poking this Russian bear with missiles.
I mean the last time this occurred was you could argue in 62 with The Khrushchev's response to the American missiles in Turkey, which was of course the attempt to ship missiles into Cuba, and we all know what kind of world crisis that provoked, and it seems to be this complete inability to circle back and try and learn from these terrifying lessons.
That's right.
You know, they never learn from the past.
Every kind of historian has said this.
But it's, you know, during the sixties there was a Cold War.
And at the time, the United States didn't have an agenda of taking over the world.
Its agenda was to prevent the Soviets from taking over the world.
But now, the United States does have an agenda of taking over the world.
And therefore, that makes it more reckless and more willing to take risks and more willing to stick fingers in the Russian bear's eyes.
But for Russia, this is a question of national survival.
It's not a question of having more influence or less.
It's how are we an independent country if Washington's got Ukraine?
And we have anti-ballistic missile bases not only in Poland and the Czech Republic and in Georgia, where they'll end up, but also in Ukraine.
We're defenseless.
We have no ability to function as a sovereign, independent state.
So they've already declared this to be a serious strategic threat.
So I expect that if Washington keeps pushing, there'll be some kind of great power confrontation.
Very, very scary.
If you don't mind, one last question, Dr. Roberts, given that I think you're The counterbalance to Noam Chomsky, who I've had on the show as well as one of the most prominent Republicans that I've had on the show.
It seems to me that the Reagan revolution, which was very inspiring to free market capitalists like myself, the rhetoric that came out, the positive goals and intentions that came out of
The Reagan revolution, you know, we weren't expecting a full Austrian economics revolution, but there was quite a lot of optimism about the degree to which Reagan plus Thatcher was going to sort of turn around the socialist snowball juggernaut of the planet that seems to be eating the Western economies whole.
And now it seems so watered down that you have John Boehner backing down From even imposing any kind of debt ceiling.
I don't know if he's afraid that the media is going to always spin it to be anti-Republican, but dealing with the left-wing media has been a constant part of Republican politics since the post-war period.
So, what do you think is going on with the Republican revolution?
They always seem to be playing defense and they always seem to be backing down or moving back from any position that they have.
Is that an accurate assessment?
I don't live in the country, that's just what I see.
Is that an accurate assessment, do you think?
And if not, why not?
And if so, do you think that there's any chance to try and bring back some of that Reaganite optimism that was so prevalent in the 80s?
Well, you know, Reagan had two goals.
One was to stop the stagflation, the simultaneous rise in unemployment and inflation.
And the other was to end the Cold War.
He wasn't a militarist and didn't say he was going to win it.
He wanted to end it.
And he achieved both goals.
But the Republicans behind Reagan, they were essentially outsiders.
You know, they had to take the nomination away from the Republican establishment.
And then Reagan was told that he has to bring George Bush in or the Republican establishment will turn on him the way they did on Goldwater and he would lose.
And so he brought them in.
And so in that way, they took back over the party.
So the Reagan thing didn't survive him.
It went back to the Republican establishment and And who quickly lost it to Clinton.
But we had, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of the neoconservatives.
Now, they had penetrated the Reagan administration, but ended up firing them all.
And some of them were actually prosecuted.
But they had a comeback with Clinton, and the whole Yugoslav thing, Serbia, all that.
And also, when George Bush was president.
They simply took over the administration.
They held every important position.
And so the Republican party is no longer what it was.
Even the Republican establishment is gone.
The Reagan people are long gone.
And so what you have now are the neoconservatives.
And then you have these Tea Party people.
Who essentially want to cut out all income support programs at a time when there's no jobs.
This, this doesn't work.
You know, you can't do that.
So I, and it's the left wing, you know, they've disappeared too.
I think the left wing lost its fire when communism collapsed.
It was no longer an alternative to American capitalism.
You know, we saw China change to Russia.
The whole thing just kind of deflated them.
And it's very hard to find where it is, this left-wing press.
I mean, it's very silent.
You know, Alexander Corbyn, before he died, and his colleague, Jeffrey Sinclair, they wrote repeatedly, there's not a left-wing press.
Where'd it go?
It's gone.
So I think that's I think that's largely true.
What we have is a ministry of propaganda for the government and for the corporations.
And at this time, the corporations and the government are not at one another's throats.
They're cooperating.
And so it's sort of a monoculture, where the government and the corporations merge.
People are starting to say it looks like fascism.
And maybe it does.
And I wonder if you could just spend a minute or two talking about your new book, How America Was Lost.
We'll, of course, put a link to it in the show notes for this conversation.
What impelled you to write it and what would you argue is the central thesis?
Well, you know, the country was lost when people accepted they had to have a police state to be free of terrorists.
In other words, only the police state can make you safe.
So what we have in the United States is the civil liberties have been completely set aside.
You know, we have indefinite detention for American citizens.
Obama went one step further and claims the right to be able to murder.
American citizens without due process of law if somebody in the administration suspects they might be involved in terrorism.
We have this universal spying, which is strictly illegal.
It's prohibited by the The FISA Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
We have these administration officials lying to Congress, admitting they lie and remaining in office.
So, essentially the United States now has all the attributes of a police state.
It also has all the attributes of a militarist warfare state.
You know, it claims it has the right to decide who the governments are going to be in various countries, including Ukraine, Libya, Syria, Iran.
It claims it has a right to invade these countries.
It's committing war crimes under the Nuremberg Standard.
Military aggression is a war crime.
That's what we use to convict the Germans after World War II and sentence them to death.
They torture.
Torture is strictly illegal under American law and international law, and yet the United States tortures.
The United States executed Japanese after World War II because they waterboarded Americans.
So this, the country is not anything like what people think it is.
It's been completely turned on its head.
There's been a massive coup d'etat in the United States.
Civil liberties no longer mean anything.
The Posse Comitatus Act is history because we now have all these publications instructing the military how to maintain domestic law enforcement and peace within the United States.
They've constructed an entire city in Virginia so the military can practice putting down rebellion from Americans.
It's just an amazing thing.
And most people don't know this.
They don't know how these people have been treated.
It's just a complete mystery to them.
And yet it's right there.
It's open.
It's not denied.
The Director of National Intelligence.
It certainly is very dangerous to wait until tyranny manifests itself in a very tangible way.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
That's well, you know, you had the Director of National Intelligence.
The Congress said, are you spying on us?
He said, no, no.
And then he got caught and he had to say, well, yes, I lied to you.
And he's still there.
I mean, nothing has happened.
Remember, Nixon had to resign because he lied about the date at which he learned of a burglary that he had nothing to do with.
And they wanted to impeach Clinton.
In fact, they did.
The House impeached him for lying about his sexual affair with a White House intern.
Well, the Nixon and Clinton crimes were so minute compared to what we've got in front of us every day and nothing is done about it.
There's not even any outcry in the press.
The Congress is not saying, you came down here and you lied to us?
Well, we'll accept your resignation.
If not, we're going to impeach you.
You know, Congress can impeach any presidential appointee, you know, all the way down to the assistant secretary level.
But nothing happens.
Nothing.
So we are lawless.
The country's lawless.
The government's lawless, is what I mean.
They've taken away the protective features in the Constitution that protects people from arbitrary power.
In other words, law is no longer a shield of the people.
It's a weapon in the hands of the government.
And they use it like that.
So it's already happening.
I mean, tyranny is already happening.
And the whole basis there is now.
And it's all happened without a peep.
There's hardly any peep.
The law schools aren't saying anything.
The bar associations.
Congress.
Nobody's in the streets.
And yet we're so concerned about democracy in Ukraine.
Right.
Right.
But not at home.
And they're protesting far less corruption And the idea that they're going to join the EU to avoid the corruption of their own government.
I think a report came out recently from a commission for the EU basically pointing out that the level of corruption in the EU is actually about the same size as the entire Ukrainian Economy.
The business-political nexus of corruption, he said, affects all 28 EU member countries and costs the EU economies $162.2 billion per annum, which is almost as large as the size of the entire GDP of Ukraine.
So the idea that they're going to go west to the bureaucrats in Brussels to avoid the corruption at home is just a complete... I mean, talk about out of the frying pan into the fire.
That's a very good point.
That's right.
You're exactly right.
The whole thing is an absurdity.
And no wonder you're puzzled why there's nothing in the media.
I mean, this is an extraordinary story.
You would think people would be all over it.
But they're in denial.
Well, in fact, they're asking the administration, what are you going to do?
And of course, it's the administration And prior administrations that have been engineering these things in Eastern Europe for since the 90s, at least as far as I've been able to find out.
So what are you going to do about that which you've engineered?
The second part of the question is about, it's a little bit more important, but it's never asked, which is really tragic.
Well, I really do appreciate your time.
For people who want to find out more, you know, excellent writer, great analyst, of course, paulcraigroberts.org.
And we'll put a link to how America was lost.
I really do appreciate your time.
Obviously, you don't need my encouragement, but I hope that you'll keep on doing what you're doing, because it is an important voice to bring clarity.
You know, the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names, and there's very little about the U.S., foreign policy in particular, that is ever called by its proper name.
So, thank you so much for all of your work.
Well, I really enjoyed speaking with you.
It was a real pleasure.
I really enjoyed it, and I like what you do.
It's a very good show that you produce.
Thank you very much.
I hope we can talk again.
Take care.
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