Scott Horton, Rob O'Neill, Cenk Uygur, Anna, and General Wesley Clark debate the Ukraine war's origins, contrasting Washington's NATO expansion with Russia's imperial ambitions. They analyze how Clinton-era "neo-containment" outmaneuvered William Perry's stability goals, while discussing Trump's potential peace deal versus Clark's demand for full territorial restitution. The episode also covers South Korea, where Robert Kelly explains President Yoon Suk Yeol's failed martial law attempt amid corruption probes. Ultimately, the discussion highlights the perilous balance between preventing nuclear escalation and addressing geopolitical grievances that fuel modern conflicts. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Unsolvable Peace Riddle00:15:34
Biden made this country and these people promises he could not keep.
It's Biden's betrayal.
These wars are not about America.
This war is about our very long time centuries-long oppressor trying to thrust us back under their control.
The book is not called justified why Russia had to do what they had to do.
Are you done with Russian propaganda?
That's all anyone ever says is that this is Russian propaganda.
But that's just a bunch of people.
Because it is.
Are you getting money or not?
I'll give me a break.
No one in America cares about Russia at all, lady.
Can you shut up for a second?
Trump's main bluff is: I'll make this war much bigger if you mess with me.
What if Putin says, yeah, go ahead?
Well, then we're in a lot of trouble.
I've never seen you quite this angry.
We can stop talking about the risk of World War III.
It's already begun.
That was a chilling warning of two United States national security experts this week.
And the evidence is certainly mounting.
Syria, Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine are all red hot.
They're all regional proxy wars with the United States at their apex, whether most voters want it to stay there or not.
Ardobe has been focused on Joe Biden's disastrous decision to pardon Hunter Biden, his son, and the cover it provides to Trump's own clemencies.
But Trump's war strategy will have much bigger consequences, and the world is awaiting his answers.
He campaigned and won with a populist anti-war message, but now he's warning that Hamas will have hell to pay if it fails to release the hostages.
And he has a cabinet with a bite to match his bark.
Ukraine's President Zelensky now says that Ukraine will be prepared to cede territory in exchange for NATO membership.
And NATO apparently agrees, but he won't make any decisions until Trump is back in the White House.
And Putin may not be interested anyway.
Many people think that a rapid retreat may provoke Putin and is the safest way back from the brink.
We've watched from the United States as the Biden administration has driven the U.S. ever closer to a nuclear conflict with Russia, the country that possesses the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
It has accelerated ever since, and it's reached its apogee so far in the weeks after Trump's election.
He's now the president-elect.
In that time, just a few weeks ago, the Biden administration, American military personnel, launched missiles into mainland Russia and killed at least a dozen Russian soldiers.
So we are, unbeknownst to most Americans, in a hot war with Russia, an undeclared war, a war you did not vote for and that most Americans don't want, but is ongoing.
Well, joining me to debate all this is the author of Provoked, How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, Scott Hornton, the former Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden, Rob O'Neill, the host of the founder of the Young Turks, Cenk Yuga, and the Ukrainian streamer and YouTuber, Ukrainian Anna.
Welcome to all of you here.
Let me start with you, Ukrainian Anna.
First time we've had you on uncensored, so welcome to you.
I watched the interview with President Zelensky at the weekend, and I went to Kyiv four months after the war began and interviewed him and the first lady.
And he was resolute then that Ukraine would not cede an inch of territory to Vladimir Putin.
And that was certainly the mood of all the people.
And yet, here we are, you know, just over two years later, and there's no doubt that he is now countenancing the idea that Ukraine would cede the territory that's been taken by Putin in return for a membership of NATO for the rest of Ukraine.
What did you think of that interview that he gave?
What I think about it is there are certain realities that we have to contend with as people.
And many people in Ukraine are of the opinion that Trump will, when he becomes president, push Ukraine to basically some sort of concession.
And our job is now to somehow figure out how do we guarantee our security in the future and how we prevent Russia from attacking us again, which is something that most people think NATO membership is because Russia is not in the business of attacking NATO countries.
It's in the business of attacking Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, countries that are outside of NATO's protection.
So yeah, most people in Ukraine obviously don't want to cede anything because we know what happens in those occupied territories and so does UN and many other organizations that gave their not to the acknowledgement that there is a systematic torture, rape, abuse, deportations of Ukrainians, prohibition of Ukrainian language, culture, and all sorts of horrible things.
And of course, nobody wants to abandon our people to that sort of fate, but also you have to kind of content with what our allies want and what is their decisions.
So I believe in that sense that Zelensky is doing exactly that.
He's acknowledging the reality of Trump's presidency and what will happen.
Yeah, so I think we should also wait and see what exactly Trump will do because his plan has been discussed, but we don't know really much details so far.
So yeah, I wouldn't jump into conclusions right now.
No, I think that's right.
And I think that...
Yeah, I mean, I'll bring Scott Hornton, Scott Horton here.
Scott, the thing about Trump is he is unpredictable.
We don't know.
I talked to him last week about this.
We don't know exactly what Trump's going to do.
People keep trying to say this is what he'll definitely do.
He'll give Putin everything he wants and so on.
I don't think that's going to happen.
But in terms of this deal that Zelensky seemed to be putting forward, where Putin would keep the land that he's taken, but that the rest of Ukraine would come under the NATO umbrella.
Do you think that's something that Putin would even consider as part of a peace settlement?
Oh, I really don't know.
I certainly doubt that he's willing to accept anything that would include even Rump, you know, what's left of Ukraine joining the NATO alliance.
I certainly hope that Trump would not entertain that.
That's what this has been largely about, of course, along with the contest over who controls what territory inside the country is preventing exactly that conclusion.
I think it's a real dilemma because the Ukrainians, you know, it's not just that Trump has won an election on repudiating Biden's policy and seeking peace here.
It's quite frankly that the Ukrainians are just in no position whatsoever to reverse Russia's gains on the ground.
Even the Biden administration admits that now.
The post, the Times, and the Journal all, quote, military experts saying that that truly is the case.
So, in other words, Kiev and DC are in a position of weakness.
And all Trump really has to threaten is more weapons sales and increased weapon shipments.
But Biden already tried that.
That didn't make the difference.
And so I think what's going to happen is the Russians are going to keep probably all four of those eastern and southern provinces there, you know, Buhansk, Donetsk, Zaprosia, and Kherson, and hopefully will not demand Kharkiv or Odessa.
We can stop it there.
And the Biden, pardon me, the Trump administration is going to have to get their messaging straight that this truly is a betrayal and they admit it, but that it's Biden's betrayal.
Biden made this country and these people promises he could not possibly keep.
We're going to help you force the Russians all the way out and all of these things.
And all they've done is gotten a bunch of people killed and then they lost anyway.
And it's a real tragedy, but it's not Trump's fault.
Trump has to be able to have the political capital in this country to say that, look, it is ugly.
But you know what, Pierce?
He actually, and I don't know how he did this.
He got Zalmay Khalilzad, the card-carrying neoconservative Straussian, to sign a deal with the Taliban to get us out of there.
And yes, Biden absolutely botched the withdrawal.
I could go on for an hour about that.
But Trump was willing to say, you know what?
We lost.
We're not keeping the Taliban out and we're going to stop trying now.
And Biden, it was really the best thing Biden ever did in his life was agree with that, even though he botched the process of the withdrawal.
And so it's the same kind of thing here.
It is a real tragedy what the Biden administration has gotten the country of Ukraine into here.
Chenk, I mean, every part of me is like, I don't want to give a Russian dictator who's illegally, in my view, invaded a sovereign democratic European country that's been independent since the mid-90s.
I don't want to give him an inch of that land that he's stolen with his murderous rampage.
But there comes in war, you know, I've got a lot of military in my family.
There comes in war, a cold, hard reality check, as Anna was alluding to earlier, where we are where we are.
You know, we can all be idealistic about what we'd like to happen.
But the reality is that it is highly unlikely.
Now, I think that Ukraine, without a massive extra support from the likes of America, which is simply not going to come, that it is a case of Putin will probably be able to keep what he's taken.
Is that your assessment?
And is that right for the world that we give him this big win, which is effectively how he will portray it?
Yeah, that is my assessment.
And so the reality on the ground is that when Trump won, we lost about 20% of Ukraine.
Now, there's a good argument to be made that you had already lost that 20% of Ukraine and you were never going to get it back because of the military realities on the ground.
So, you know, this has been a very, very difficult question because the U.S. did push Russia too much.
We did push NATO to its borders when we said we wouldn't.
I understand all that.
But at the end of the day, the Russians invaded.
And it's not an anti-war position to start a war.
So Putin is definitely guilty.
Add on top of that, 12,000 civilians killed.
Add on top of that, 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped.
But what's the answer?
Is the answer to fight for the next 10 years, 20 years?
Is the answer to cede ground to Putin?
Well, that's also super dangerous.
That's why this is an unsolvable riddle, because you can get to peace now by doing what Trump is likely going to do, which is Russia take 20% of it and Ukraine will not join NATO.
But the next time Russia thinks about invading a country, they're going to think, well, we went into Georgia and took a chunk.
We went into Crimea, took it all when it was part of Ukraine.
We went into Ukraine again, we took 20% of it.
It turns out aggression is rewarded.
And Netanyahu's watching, and he's going to take a part of Gaza, and China's watching, and they've got the Uyghurs in the detention camps and the re-education camps.
And the Russians have the Ukrainian children in the re-education camps.
So this is really, really dangerous for the world, no matter how it's resolved.
Yeah, Rob O'Neill, you've been at the sharp end of some of the worst conflicts, wars of the last 25 years.
And once again, thank you very much for your extraordinary service, not least in killing bin Laden.
What is your overview of where we are here?
Trump coming in, obviously, is going to change the dynamic.
He proved in his first term, he's not a war monkey.
He thinks war apart from anything else is just terrible business, that it costs a fortune.
The rewards are very low.
The other side of that coin is, do you let a Russian dictator run into a European country, take what he wants, and just let him have it?
What's your view?
Well, unfortunately, we're in a position where it doesn't matter why we got here.
We're just here.
And Chenk was mentioning Georgia and Crimea and invasion of Ukraine.
That's all weak leadership on the United States.
And unfortunately, when we have a strong United States, we have a more stable world most of the time.
I mean, we did invade Iraq, and I disagree with that, even though I went there.
But you're going to have to go to a position of negotiation.
I mean, we did say we weren't going to push in NATO further east, and we did.
Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia.
We were moving there.
And now Ukraine wants to be a part of NATO.
And, you know, Russia doesn't want that.
And you're dealing with big countries, but you're also dealing with big egos.
And Vladimir Putin grew up in a part of Russia where part of the fun was chasing rats with sticks.
And he found out what it was like to corner a rat.
And that's kind of where he is right now.
He's been in charge of Russia since the early 90s, let's be honest.
And he wants to save faith with his people.
He's lowering the conscription age to get people in there to fight.
It's like he's not going to back out, but you can't let him take more.
And I'm by no means defending him, but I also think that Vlodymir Zelensky is a puppet and he's, you know, he's laundering money just like most of the people in Washington and Ukraine.
That's why the whole argument in Ukraine is how much money people can personally make in Ukraine.
And, you know, I hopefully think that Donald Trump brings a big stick.
Also, he doesn't care about embezzling money like the United States is now and whatever they're doing.
But it's not a good situation, but we definitely need deterrence.
We need Alliance Solidarity, which we lost by leaving Afghanistan the way we did, and a forward defense.
Right now, our Navy, which is the epitome of our forward defense, is under the Biden administration, is worrying about getting more transgender bathrooms and getting green ships, even though they're all nuclear, which is green.
It just, there needs to be some adults in the room and talk reality because here's where we are.
And someone needs to come to the table and talk to someone else, not worried about how much jewelry Mrs. Zelensky could buy in New York or the taxpayers' dime.
Right.
And how popular is Vladimir Zelensky now with Ukrainian people, do you think?
I'd say pretty popular still.
Most people consider him a pretty good representative of Ukrainian people and what we want.
And pretty disheartening, I'd say, to hear what people say here, but I'm used to it.
Surprisingly, Ching, I agree with, in the sense that we can't allow Russia to continue get away with what they're doing because that's what they have been doing, in particular with annexation of Georgian territory and Moldova and Ukraine in 2014 and now in 22 full-scale invasion.
And yeah, nothing stops them then from fully invading Moldova or Georgia.
They are already doing all they can to select people there as presidents and meddle in their elections quite strongly already.
And if they can't do it with just hybrid methods of sabotaging the elections and making people basically install their puppets there, then they do, well, sort of like a blackmail, then they do threats and then they do annexation, invasion, terror, death, and all that we are having right now in Ukraine.
And that's not Biden.
Justifying Full Invasion00:14:04
And how would you describe the mood of the Ukrainian people?
When I was there, like I say, two years ago, to a man and woman, whatever age, that I met, there was this steely resolve of we've got to win this at all costs.
But the cost has been enormous.
You know, so many cities just destroyed.
So many people killed.
All these children being taken and so on.
Is there a mood now in the country that they just want peace, just want a deal, even if it means surrendering the territory that's been taken?
Well, nobody wants peace more than us.
I live in a city that is bombed every day.
You know, my father has been killed.
So, of course, we want peace, but that depends on what that peace is, because nobody wants peace without any sort of justice, right?
And that is the problem, because we have to consider our now, obviously, right?
Even if the fire stops.
So, let's say my city stops being bombed every day.
That's a bonus for me, obviously, right?
And for my family and for my friends.
But how important is that bonus?
Because it's a temporarily bonus.
We have to think about the future that other people, other generations, are not going to go through the exact same things we went through.
And that's quite important to most Ukrainians.
But the mood, of course, has been solid.
As you said, people were more enthusiastic before, specifically because of the, I would say, lack of care and lack of commitment from our allies, particularly the incredible amount of limitations on our long-range strikes.
For example, as you know, UK actually gave us the long-range missiles, storm shadows, I believe they're called.
And we couldn't really use them because of the limitations that were given to us, primarily by the United States and by Biden, by the way, himself, his administration, at least.
So, in that sense, there has been a sort of demoralizing effect, of course, because of the lack of aid, inconsistent aid from both the United States and also European countries as well.
And it's hard to sustain that sort of like, I'd say, hopefulness and will when you are not confident that you will have means to fight with properly.
And that, I would say, dampened the mood.
Yeah, I understand that.
Scott, you know, a lot of people have come on this show since this war started.
And they've made the argument, which I know that you subscribe to, which is effectively the West and Ukraine goaded Russia into doing this by continually pushing for NATO membership, for NATO encroachment, and so on, as the Russians saw it.
There's not a school of thought that this could have been resolved diplomatically.
That actually, yeah, you can take that argument.
You can see there's merit to that argument, certainly to a degree, but it doesn't justify launching a full invasion of your neighboring country.
Would you accept that the invasion itself didn't actually have to happen?
Yes, I have a whole section in my book about all of Putin's different options that he could have taken.
The book is not called Justified Why Russia Had to Do What They Had to Do.
It's called Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, because the book is 700 pages of all of this going back to the end of the last Cold War.
And I, you know, with all due respect to the guy that shot Bin Laden in the head, thank you.
And with all due respect to this young woman whose poor country is being bombed to death and their opinions here, it's just not the case that what we have is a simple case of a Hitlerian Putin-led Russia running roughshod and rampage.
And the only thing to stop them is when tough, good guys like us stand up to a bully like him.
For example, in a war that they both cited numerous times here today, the Georgia war was begun by the American sock puppet, Saa Kashvili.
He launched that war and killed Russian peacekeepers in his initial assault.
And they lied about that, led by John McCain during the campaign at the time in 2008.
But even the New York Times later admitted that, yeah, it was true, that that was how that war started.
And it was a, and part of his motivation to do that was that Bush, a few months before, had given him sort of a pseudo-membership action plan for joining NATO.
But you can't join NATO if you don't have settled borders.
And Georgia had these two breakaway provinces under Russian protection.
And so he was trying to reincorporate them so he would have a settled border so he could join America's military alliance, which completely blew up in his face and got a bunch of people killed.
But that's just not the same thing as Putin wakes up every day scheming on how he can conquer Poland.
And only America's threat of ultimate H-bomb annihilation is holding him at bay.
It's just really not like that.
It's much more complicated than that.
And, you know, again, back to your original question.
It's not to say that he's justified in what he's done, but it's like if you get in a bar fight, you're shoving a guy with a knife in his pocket and he stabs you.
That doesn't justify, you shoving him doesn't justify him stabbing you.
But also, you were shoving a guy with a knife in his pocket.
And don't pretend like he just woke up this morning looking to pick a fight with you.
And one more thing here, a great example, and then I'll leave it, is the status quo in Crimea held from 1991 all the way through 2014.
What changed was that, and there was a controversy over it.
So extremely important Russian naval base there at Sevestopol and the rest of this.
It was in controversy since independence.
But the status quo held until the Barack Obama government overthrew the government of Ukraine for the second time in 10 years.
And then the new regime immediately threatened to repeal and abolish the Kharkiv Pact, the agreement by which Russia was allowed to stay at Sevestopol.
And it was only then that they seized the Crimean Peninsula.
So it's not to say that, oh, it was perfectly justified for them to do so, but it is to say that it was Barack Obama and Joe Biden who picked that fight, and then it was Putin who finished it.
And then this is a big part of the reason why the war in the East broke out immediately was because when the dissenters seized buildings in the East, and including with some Russian help, just like the Westerners helped the Maidan, they declared war against them.
They overreacted at John Brennan's behest.
We know this.
It was reported in Forbes.
John Brennan went there on April 12th.
They launched the war on the 14th.
And the reason they did that was because the coup had already blown up in their face in the loss of Crimea.
So they weren't about to tolerate this kind of dissent in the East.
It's not Russian propaganda.
I'm a Texan.
I don't even read Russian or know what the Russians say about this stuff.
Oh, shit.
This is the history of the world.
I speak Russian.
That's my question.
Can I please interject with that?
Well, let me just say right here.
Anytime anyone contradicts the party line on this, that's all anyone ever says is that this is Russian propaganda.
But that's just a bunch of people who are speaking the truth.
Are you getting money or not?
I'm just wondering, you know, lady.
At least they paid you.
See, that really is all you have because you can't contradict any of my facts.
So you have to continue.
I can contradict everything you said.
I put it in my domain.
No one in America cares about Russia at all, lady.
Nobody in America cares about Russia.
Back in the days of communism, there were communists that did.
Can I please have a word?
This person spoke quite a bit.
We had given him a rupert to repeat Russian talking points and lies, blatant lies.
So, you know, I okay, well, Scott, let Anna just respond to what you were saying, Scott.
I'm interested to hear that a lot of the bullshit was said, so it's kind of difficult to counter everything.
Basically, it was not a coup, it was a revolution that millions of people participated in.
The reason we participated, me included, I was 19 back in the day.
It was because we had severe problems with corruption and a tyrannical puppet of Russia, Yanukovych, who refused to make a treaty with the European Union, which is what most of the people in Ukraine wanted,
60-something percent, and especially younger people, wanted to move away from Russian control, from Russians owning every single business industry in my country, and to have some sort of like laws and order and also have some sort of democracy and liberty.
That is what something people have in the West, and that's something that we did not have.
So that was about revolution, it was about that, about students going and protesting and getting beaten up.
And Yanukovych then going to Russia to essentially ask Putin his body, how can he stop the protesters, which he then made dictator laws that prohibited people to effectively protest at all in this country.
So we didn't appreciate that.
And we went, literally, millions of people participated in Maidan.
That is not a coup.
That is not something you buy for Obama or Nuland cookies.
I'm sorry to say.
Never received a single cookie yet.
It's been a long time.
And yeah, all of that, going to Georgia is a whole other thing, but that's just what Russia does.
It creates unrest.
It supports militias in the countries.
And then it basically fluids them with weapons and also applies its own soldiers to annex territory by the guise of protecting Russian speakers or any of that.
Scott is a master.
I believe Scott is the name, right?
Here.
But I am a Russian speaker from eastern Ukraine.
It's about as easy as it gets in Kharkiv.
And I didn't require their protection.
I was never prosecuted.
What they did is that they attacked us under the guise of protecting Russian speakers that were never prosecuted in this country because half of us literally are Russian speakers.
We have been rucified back in the day by Russian Empire.
So yeah, this war is about not about you.
I'm sad to say some things are not about America.
This war is about our very long time centuries long oppressor trying to thrust us back under their control.
And we didn't want that.
People in Georgia don't want that, if you can see it, by now, currently, by the revolution and the protests going on in the country, exactly for the same reason, because their corrupt Russian puppet government refused the people's will to be part of Europe.
So it was never about NATO because we never discussed joining NATO until Russian invasion.
It was never even a conversation in Ukraine about joining NATO.
So thanks for the lies, obviously.
Also, also, yeah, they do have borders with NATO right now, and they had them before.
Now it's even bigger.
It doubled because Finland, in fear of Russia, joined NATO.
That's why people joined NATO, because they want protection from Russian aggression.
Okay.
Thank you, Anna.
Rob, you've been waiting patiently.
It's interesting.
I mean, I find with these debates, I learn a lot, but I'm not entirely sure where the truth lies.
Having just heard two very different versions of the history here, what would you like to say?
Well, I mean, what I'd like to say is obviously Anna has more experience than me.
She lives there.
She's lost family members.
And having seen war firsthand, I know that most people don't want to be at war.
Most people are trying to get on with their lives.
And unfortunately, there are bad people that force this stuff.
And my heart goes out to them too.
And I'm definitely going to buy Scott's book after this.
I'm actually sitting here on this panel learning a lot and I'm open-minded about stuff because I used to be, you know, America apple pie and we're the greatest in the world, but I've seen stuff that we've done.
Sitting here in the United States, having worked in DC and living in New York, I just don't like my taxpayer dollars going over to a place where people are funneling it into their own pockets and threatening a nuclear war because it doesn't matter who does it.
If one nuke gets launched, if it's India to Pakistan or Israel to somewhere else, or the United States decides, the only country, by the way, to ever drop a nuclear weapon on another country, if that happens again, we're going to go into a thing called nuclear winter.
And you're going to want to die in the blast.
You're not going to want to die doing that.
My interest is in getting corrupt politics out.
Well, first here.
Hopefully it starts in January.
And then maybe it can spread somewhere else.
You're never going to get rid of corrupt politicians because narcissists are just, they just go there.
Washington's full of them.
I've been there.
I've seen them.
Obviously, Vladimir Putin's a horrible person.
I don't like Volodymyr Zelensky either.
I'm tired of seeing innocent people get killed for other people getting rich because that's what happens.
I'm tired of seeing soldiers who don't want to be there, both Ukraine and Russia, fighting in trenches like they did in World War I and getting hit with suicide drones, which is the wave of the future, almost to the point where we're going to stop having manned jets because it's not, it's a waste of time and legions of drones will be fighting.
I hate to see this escalation of force.
I hate to see people getting rich everywhere from the industrial complex to the military, of big pharma, of all that stuff.
It's just sad as someone who went somewhere, risked my own life to kill the number one terrorist in the world, and now wonder if some of the places we went were even worth it or we're just making people like Dick Cheney rich.
So that's why I'm here.
And I'm just open-minded.
I want to hear what Chenk has to say.
Buying the book.
Love to hear Scott's book.
Love to hear what Anna's saying.
And I'm honest to God just learning stuff here today.
So you know what?
That's such a great, honest answer, Rob.
That's why I love having you on censored because you're an honest guy.
And I really appreciate that.
I feel the same way.
I don't profess to be a great expert here.
Chenk, I'm going to come to you in a second.
I'm just going to have a quick break to speak to the former NATO Supreme Ally Commander, General Wesley Clark.
General, thank you very much indeed for joining us.
Oh, happy to be here, Piers.
I'm listening to this panel.
Look, there's a lot of misinformation.
Trump's Tough Position00:03:04
I was in Ukraine on the 20th, 31st of March.
I went through Maidan.
I talked to the people.
I looked at the lamppost where Putin's henchmen had killed a bunch of Ukrainians or a bunch of bullets still embedded in the lamppost.
I followed it very, very closely.
I don't know exactly what you want to talk about.
If I'd been on your panel, I would have probably disagreed with most of them.
The people in Ukraine are fighting for democracy.
NATO didn't push itself to the borders.
It was drawn to the borders by the people in Eastern Europe who wanted freedom.
They wanted freedom from Russian oppression.
That's why NATO expanded in response to them.
Not because NATO wanted to expand.
It's because in order to stabilize, you had to be able to provide investment.
And to get investment, people needed security.
And they were living in fear of Russia coming back.
Now, when did Putin decide to come back?
As soon as he became president in 1999, at the speech he made in the inauguration of President Kuchma in Ukraine, Putin said, Ukraine and Russia, we're more than brothers.
We're in each other's souls.
Poland sent its national security advisor to see me after that, said, he's trying to restore the Soviet Union.
He's coming after us.
So this is a long-held ambition by Mr. Putin.
And he's seen weakness in the West repeatedly.
And that weakness has encouraged him to move.
And it's going to continue until the West shows strength.
And that strength means providing much more to Ukraine, bringing Ukraine into NATO, and saying to Mr. Putin very directly, look, stop, stop.
We're not interested in strategic arms discussions.
We're not interested in investing in your economy.
We're not interested in having nice conversations in Switzerland with you until you pull back, return the children, account for the inductees, bring to trial the war criminals that have been indicted in Ukrainian courts, and you owe us close to a trillion dollars in destruction of our company, country.
So, Piers, these are very clear lines.
This is 1937, 1938, and you would have heard the same kind of apologists for Hitler.
You would have heard them saying the peace in Versailles was unfair and the French and there's corruption and so forth.
There's corruption in every government.
It's there in your government.
It's there in the United States.
It's there in Ukraine, but it's never the same as it is in Russia, where organized crime works as an arm of the government connected to the intelligence agencies to assure that Putin and his cronies get what they want.
Standing Firm Against Hitler00:12:31
So I think it's a very difficult time.
I don't know how the negotiations are going to turn out, but I would tell you this, that Mr. Trump's in a tough position because if he gives Putin what he wants, he looks weak to the rest of the world.
And if he looks to the rest of the world, China is going to move.
We've got in the United States a window now to do something in the Middle East.
And I think Netanyahu probably will ask Mr. Trump to do it and pose a choice for the Iranian regime, either knock off the hegemonial aspirations and shut down this arc of resistance, including the weapons to the Houthis, or face the consequences.
With Iran, you have to go to the source.
With Russia, you have to stand firm.
We've had deterrence in place for 70 years.
We have nuclear weapons.
Putin doesn't want to use a nuclear weapon.
He's afraid of nuclear weapons, but he's using them to threaten.
So people like your bearded guy whose name I didn't get, these are people who are repeating Russian talking points.
It's exactly what the woman from Ukraine said.
Now, I will tell you that people in Ukraine are suffering and they would love an end to this conflict.
They didn't choose it.
It was forced on them.
But the only way it's going to be successfully resolved is by strong U.S. leadership.
And Mr. Trump is in a position where no matter what he said about ending the war in 24 hours, he's in a position where he simply cannot and will not concede everything that Putin wants.
He won't do it.
If he does, you won't make America great again.
You'll invite war elsewhere in the world.
So I see you brought in the rest of the panel here.
I'll stop.
Well, no, you know what, General?
I've interviewed you many times.
I've seen you interview many times.
I've never seen you quite this angry.
It feels to me like you're angry about where things are going.
I'm angry about, well, Piers, I'm angry about hearing the misinformation from some members of your, okay?
Now, I was...
Can I explain something before you talk, please, sir?
I was at the beginning of NATO enlargement.
I was there at the beginning.
I talked to foreign leaders.
I set up the program as a staff officer in the Pentagon.
I was the NATO commander who went to Bulgaria and Romania and Estonia and Latvia.
And they told me we've got to be in NATO.
They didn't say, hey, if you want us, okay, I bet you blah, blah, blah, blah.
We said we don't want you.
It's too much of a problem.
They said, please, please help us.
And so that's exactly what happened.
That's how we got there.
In 2014, when Putin went into Crimea, the Ukrainians could have stopped it, but they asked the United States, what should we do?
And the United States told them, give up Crimea.
Why?
Because we wanted Putin's cooperation in the Middle East and with Iran to stop Iran's nuclear program.
When Putin went further in Donbas, we provided information, but we provided no lethal assistance to Ukraine.
For all these years, the United States administration was timid in dealing with Putin.
It's like one member of the administration said recently of the Biden administration said, oh, we never expected to have nuclear weapons.
I mean, oh, ooh.
Nuclear weapons have been the foundation for Western security since the end of the Second World War.
We've had near confrontations with the Soviets.
And because American presidents didn't back down, we didn't have war.
Now, Mr. Trump has put himself in an extremely difficult position.
But all of our talk about Ukraine and providing, telling Ukraine in advance, well, you're going to have to give up your territory.
And by the way, you're not going to be a member of NATO.
Let's not do any of this right now.
Let's put the forces, let's get the forces in Ukraine the weapons and support they need so that the people who have already been mobilized can have these weapons and provide the reserves that are necessary in Ukraine.
Let's leave an open-ended commitment for Mr. Trump.
Let's tell the Ukrainians, strike to your heart's content in Russia.
You get no sanctuary, Mr. Putin.
You started this.
You pay the price.
And then let's go into the talk with understanding what we want.
We want all of Ukraine's land back.
We want reparations.
We want the children returned.
We want the missing people accounted for.
And we want the war criminals put on trial.
And then we can talk about sanctions relief.
No sanctions relief until the conditions are satisfied.
And, you know, it's very hard for democracies to be able to stand up to a man like Putin.
He doesn't have to worry about reelection.
But we need the leadership in the West.
I've seen it in some countries.
Macron sometimes comes off very strong.
Britain has come off very strong in this.
And right now, the Biden administration is trying to surge support into Ukraine.
And I think President Trump, when he comes in, is going to realize that whatever his relationship is with Mr. Putin and however many times he's called him, he's not going to easily give in and sacrifice Ukraine.
He can't afford to.
And Putin's already threatened him.
Putin's already told him that he's worried about his safety.
That's like Tony Soprano is saying to you, I'm really worried about the way you're walking across the street.
So I'm not angry, Piers, except that there's a lot of misinformation.
She's going to get in here and respond now, basically.
Okay, General, thank you.
If you don't mind, I'll bring the others in.
I've got to say, you have articulated exactly what I've been feeling this entire time.
And I've started to think I was going completely mad, but to have somebody with your experience, particularly about from the very start of NATO, outlining what I believe has been the way this has all played out, is actually quite reassuring to me that I've not gone nuts.
Let me bring in Chenk, because you've not had a chance to respond for a while.
No, Scott, Scott, I'm going to come to you.
Scott, Scott, Scott, I will come to you after Cheng.
I must let Chenk have his say.
Chenk, you've been listening to all this, very different opinions, but what is your reaction?
Yeah, I want to tell you my thoughts.
And then I actually would love to ask General Clark a question.
And so, look, I understand both sides of this equation.
So, if you're the Ukrainians, imagine if some other nation had taken 20% of America.
Would we want to give up?
Would we want to go, oh, yeah, it's okay.
Just take Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, et cetera.
It's fine.
No, we'd hate it and we'd fight forever, right?
So, I understand that.
On the other hand, you know, when General Clark starts talking about the nuclear weapons, I get super scared because what if Trump's bluff gets called at some point?
Trump's main bluff is, oh, yeah, you better not mess with me.
I'm crazy.
I'll make this war much bigger if you mess with me.
Yeah, but what if Putin says, yeah, go ahead?
Well, then we're in a lot of trouble, right?
Because I don't want to get involved in a war like this.
I don't want to get involved with nuclear weapons, et cetera.
On the other hand, your point about Russian aggression is definitely true.
I can't stand these people starting wars, taking territory, and it breaks my heart to see it.
They kidnap children, etc.
So, but General Clark, the question I wanted to ask you, and you know how much I respect you, and we have a relationship before.
And by the way, the audience should know, General Clark is the one that called out the neocons for trying to invade seven countries at once, including the Iraq war.
And so he's earned a lot of respect by doing that.
But General Clark, this is a genuine question, which is, okay, but if we go with what you're saying, how long do we fight?
How long does Ukraine fight?
How much money do we spend?
How many years of war do we have to endure?
And what if Ukraine just doesn't win?
So we're, let's say, we go another two years, five years, 20 years.
How do we resolve it if Ukraine can't win?
Well, I think what you have to do is understand that this war will go on until Putin believes he can't win.
So all the discussion in the West about how to preemptively surrender territory and all this is, it all feeds Putin's appetite.
He understands from all this discussion that the West is weakening in its will.
And therefore, if he just keeps shoving soldiers forward, that eventually the West will comply and cut off assistance to Ukraine and tell Ukraine, good luck.
Hope you enjoy being part of Poland again.
Because that's his aim.
He wants, he doesn't really care about Lviv.
What he wants is the north coast of the Black Sea and Odessa, and of course, Kharkiv and Kyiv and so forth.
And then he wants the rest of Europe, Eastern Europe, that used to be under Soviet dominion.
He needs this in order to be able to confront China.
And this is the ultimate fear of Russia and its leadership.
And they know they can't confront China unless they have control over Eastern Europe, including the Baltics and Poland and the rest of the Balkan Peninsula.
And so it's a long-term geostrategic game.
And Jink, I just tell you this: there's no American soldiers over there getting killed.
And most of the money that's been appropriated by the United States has gone to buy new weapons in the United States.
We're giving them the old stuff, the old ATACOMs.
We've just recently even reprioritized our military sales program.
We're still selling eight tackoms to Morocco.
Now, why does Morocco need 68 TACOMs?
I don't know.
But we're selling stuff off patriots all over the world.
That stuff should go to Ukraine.
As long as the United States stands firm, we won't have nuclear weapons and nuclear war.
Putin doesn't want it either.
But he does believe right now that we will collapse.
And he will continue to threaten the nuclear and play the nuclear card because that's the way the Russians play it.
And so you just have to stand firm against it.
And you need strong leadership and you need the American people behind you.
And what you have to understand is that Putin understands how to manipulate public opinion.
In every country in Europe, there are people there saying, just like one of the gentlemen on this panel said, you know, this is crazy and people are getting killed and I'm tired of seeing people dying and we've got to have peace.
In 1937, 38, in Europe, everybody had fresh memories of the First World War.
It was a horrible experience.
A whole generation of British young men were wiped out.
The French got, it got so bad that in one group of French divisions, they pulled out every 10th soldier and shot him for cowardice.
Nobody wanted a repeat of the First World War.
And so Hitler occupied the Rhineland against instruction.
Hitler rearmed.
Hitler rebuilt the military.
And at every stage, there were people who said, well, this is really dangerous, but please, we can't think about it.
It can't be another world war.
So we're revisiting this in a slightly different form today.
If we believe in democracy, if we believe in what we set up, if we believe in the lessons we learned from the Second World War, then we've got to stand firm against Mr. Putin.
President Biden should have said to him, look, bud, you come after Ukraine, I promise you, you're going to lose.
You're going to lose.
But he didn't say that.
And he's never said that.
No, he hasn't.
That's the policy has to start.
Revisiting World War Fears00:11:58
Okay, General, thank you very much.
Let me bring Scott Holton in to respond to that because you're being compared to the people back in the late 30s who just didn't see the danger of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
It's completely preposterous.
And it's the refuge of scoundrels who have run out of arguments.
I think anyone could see that.
It's the same thing as this endless claim.
I mean, isn't this just a talking point that anyone who disagrees is repeating Russian talking points?
I don't sit around watching RT all day memorizing what the Russian regime says and repeating that.
I wrote a book that's 775,000 words.
Most of it is American graybeards talking about how they know better than the thing that they're about to do and then doing it anyway.
And, you know, one of the things that I talk about in there, although I couldn't find too much about General Clark's role in this, but when there was a debate, and I'd like to pose this in the form of a question to him, when there was a debate in the 1990s in the Bill Clinton administration about whether to do NATO expansion or whether to do the partnership for peace, was it not the Secretary of Defense, William Perry, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shally Kashvili, with the help of General Clark?
Weren't they the ones who argued the Pentagon for peace?
Let's do the partnership for peace instead of NATO expansion.
And it was Richard Holbrook and Talbot and Lake who outclassed the Pentagon in office politics and forced through NATO expansion instead.
And the William Perry, John Shalley Kashvili, and I believe at the time, Wesley Clark argument was, we don't want to redraw the dividing line in Europe.
Yes, it's true.
A lot of these countries that used to be dominated by Soviet communists in the battle days, of course, want to join NATO.
But we got to look at what's good for us.
And what's most important for us is that we keep a decent relationship, a stable relationship with Russia.
And one great way to do that would be to, as they said they were going to do at the time, Piers, turn NATO into a political organization, sort of like the EU plus America.
But then they would have, instead of an alliance, because there's no enemy anymore, now we would have the partnership for peace, a new security architecture, and Russia, the Russian Federation and Ukraine would be members of it.
And then that way, Ukraine's neutrality as an obviously extremely important country locked between European civilization and Russia there, the controversy will be settled with pseudo, like a de facto permanent neutrality there.
And then what happened was the Hawks won the argument.
And then as all of the gray beards said at the time, oh no, you see what we're doing?
We're just redrawing the line.
The policy has gone from containment to friends to neocontainment.
This is before W. Bush ever even came to town.
Okay, well, let me...
All right, let me put that point then to someone who, by the way, for the record, does not have a gray beard, General Clark.
But would you like to respond to what you've just heard?
It's actually, you're right.
We had a multiplicity of interests with Russia at the time the Clinton administration came in.
And the first interest was to control the nuclear weapons that were in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and then Luce Nukes argument took priority.
And we got legislation passed, the non-Luger Agreement amendment.
Basically, we put billions of dollars into helping control the Soviets, former Soviets, a nuclear arsenal.
And as part of that, we assured Ukraine that when they gave up their nuclear weapons and Russia signed on to this, that their boundaries would be respected.
You see, in 1991, Ukraine had already voted in favor of independence.
The people in Ukraine never wanted to be under Russian control.
It's a separate culture.
It's a different language.
If you look up, and I don't know if you speak Russian, but apparently you don't, but I do.
And I thought, well, I'll just brush up on my Russian and be able to speak Ukrainian.
It's a different language.
And it's a different culture.
It's a different history.
Ukraine's been independent in the past.
And it was one of the first subjects of Russia's imperial ambitions going back to Catherine the Great.
And the way that it operates is it's not a nice colonialism.
It's an ugly colonialism in which Russia says, I'm in charge here.
I want a part of your business.
And they buy people and they influence.
And I've met many Ukrainian leaders over the years, including some who've made billions of dollars off their associations with Russia.
So when the United States looked at this in the early 1990s, we were hopeful that there would actually be democratic reform in Russia, but it didn't happen.
And as Bill Clinton traveled abroad in 1993 and in 1994, and he looked at it himself and talked to these East European leaders who were emerging, they begged Clinton to give us the protection of NATO.
And so that weekend that you're referring to when Al Gore made the speech that Richard Holbrook wrote in Berlin, and yes, I checked with my bosses in the Pentagon.
I said, no, of course we're not in charge.
We don't want NATO enlarged.
We've got enough problems.
Don't bring any other issues.
Partnership for peace had already been established.
Russia was a member of it.
And I said to my boss, I said, they keep putting this thing in here about enlarging NATO.
And I keep scratching it out and it keeps coming back in.
And sure enough, Vice President Gore gave that speech and he gave it at the direction of the President of the United States because President Clinton himself, in going through Eastern Europe, had looked and listened to the leadership there.
He knew the history.
He knew foreign relations.
He knew foreign policy.
And he determined that the best avenue for peace forward was to both provide security for Eastern Europe through opportunities for NATO membership if they wanted it, and work with Russia and give Russia a special relationship with NATO.
So we formed the NATO-Russia Council.
The NATO-Russia Council had all the members of NATO listening to Russia and all of its concerns in 1997, 1998, 1999.
I was there sitting in that council when former Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov gave us a lecture.
Russia has no permanent friends.
Russia has only permanent interests.
And he's looking at me and I know who he was.
He's the guy who basically started the Palestinian terrorist organizations as a KGB agent.
And he knew who I was and we knew each other.
And I knew what he was saying.
He was saying that Russia didn't appreciate NATO, wouldn't cooperate with NATO, and was going to go its own way.
He later ran for president, lost to Vladimir Putin.
But the point is that the United States worked assiduously to try to bring stability to Eastern Europe, including working with Russia.
And it was Russia that really didn't want this.
From the beginning, we actually had hopes that Russia might join NATO.
But from the beginning of Putin's time, he crushed democracy, crushed dissent, and step-by-step consolidated power using the mafia, the Russian mafia, and the intelligence agencies.
And so we are in the position where we are today.
I've always wished I could talk to Putin and say, look, it's not that we disrespect you.
We like Russia.
We love Russian music, culture, your history.
There's so many great things that have come out of Russia.
But you can't step on other people.
You can't treat people that way.
You can't invade other countries.
We're not going to invade you.
There's no threat here.
I was with the Russian foreign minister when we were dealing with the conventional forces in Europe treaty in 1998.
And Minister Ivanov said, well, under this treaty, in a time of detention, NATO could put a division in Slovakia on the borders of Russia or Belarus.
And I said, Mr. Minister, one NATO division on the borders of Belarus is a threat to Russia?
Come on now.
Ivanov laughed.
He knew it wasn't a threat.
He knew it.
And so, you know, you just, I'm not accusing anybody of reading and repeating what Russia is telling you to say.
I'm saying there's a lot of misinformation out here.
But we are where we are.
And the only way just one short follow-up there very, very quickly.
We have to wrap, but very quickly, yeah.
Sure.
Yeah, very briefly.
I wonder, General Clark, if you're aware that your then boss, William Perry, he later told the Guardian that it was the greatest regret of his life that he did not do every single thing he could to stop Clinton from going down the path of NATO expansion.
Well, okay, I'll tell you what, here's what I'll do, Scott.
I'll just ask General Clark, and please be brief if you don't mind, General Clark, but was Clinton right or wrong looking with hindsight?
Well, I think Clinton was right in hindsight because when you unravel what actually happened with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and I don't have the greatest respect for Dr. Perry, but the KGB, there's a book written on this called Putin's People, and you can read it.
But basically, the KGB saw it collapsing in the late 1980s.
They didn't trust Gorbachev.
They moved the money to the West.
When democracy started, most of the people in the political parties in Russia were former intelligence agents.
They'd been schooled in how to campaign.
They formed different political parties to make it appear as though there were different parties.
But in reality, they were anxious to regain power.
So we never really followed through with the opportunity that the dissolution of the Soviet Union presented to us.
I mean, you know, we could have sent democracy trainers into the Soviet Union.
We didn't.
We had the National Endowment for Democracy.
It was just scratching the surface.
We never really reached out to the Russian people.
It's a different culture.
They don't understand it.
They're isolated.
And just like the American people, don't understand foreign policy.
Neither do the Russian people.
A UN diplomat told me once, he said, you know, you Americans are like the Russians.
Most of your people don't even have passports.
You live far from national borders.
You don't have any appreciation for other nationalities.
We could have extended a stronger hand in friendship.
And I'm talking not at Clinton.
I'm talking about George H. Bush when it happened.
We just didn't do it.
And we had a very brief window to make a great difference.
We didn't.
I think that the protection we provided through NATO membership for the countries of Eastern Europe and that we want to extend to Ukraine has been really important.
If you look, I drove a couple of times from eastern Poland into Ukraine.
South Korea Crisis00:04:49
In eastern Poland, the houses are painted, the fields are cultivated, everything looks good.
As soon as you go across that border, the difference in prosperity is marked.
And it's marked because Ukraine hasn't had the protection of the European Union and NATO.
And that's why the people in 2014, 2013, and Maidan, they saw this.
Ukraine and Poland were economically similar in the 1980s.
But by 2014, Poland's GDP per capita was two or three times what it was in Ukraine, simply because Poland had the association with the West with its security provided by NATO.
So we've got to get through what is more than a bump in a road.
It's a critical period in international policy where we're going to decide whether the rule of law prevails or we're going to go back to the 19th century competition between empires and emperors and to hell with the people underneath.
And that's where we are.
I've got to leave it there.
I don't want to, actually.
I could honestly do another two or three hours of this.
It has been an absolutely fascinating conversation with all of you.
I really appreciate you all joining me.
I've got to leave it there reluctantly, but thank you very much indeed.
Hey, thanks, everybody.
Cheers.
Nice to be with you.
Thank you, General.
Well, just before we go, a quick look at what on earth has gone on in South Korea over the past 48 hours is the American political analyst on Inter-Korean Affairs, Robert Kelly.
Robert, thanks so much for joining me.
What the hell is going on in South Korea?
Explain to a layman what the reality is about this extraordinary development in the last 24 hours.
Yeah, it looks like the president tried to declare martial law over fairly minor stuff, which is to say gridlock in the parliament and the opposition's investigation of his appointees and his wife.
And he's apparently quite sensitive about the perception that his wife is corrupt.
This has been sort of a running issue in South Korea for a while now.
And he just wildly overreacted, right?
I mean, there was just no sense that this was coming at all.
I mean, there's nothing in the Korean media about this a couple of days ago.
You know, he did it at 10 o'clock at night.
Half the country was asleep, woke up the next morning.
They're like, what was going on?
You know, I mean, it was just a complete shock out of the blue, which you've seen in the media coverage all over the world.
Nobody really had any sense that this was coming at all.
And, you know, because it was so drastic and sharp and extreme, I think it collapsed almost as rapidly because the South Korean parliament was like, just like you, like, what the hell is this?
Right.
And they voted against it.
Is it likely that this guy will now inevitably be removed from office sooner rather than later?
Yes, I would imagine.
South Korea went through an entire impeachment cycle with a president just seven years ago.
So there's a practice template, if you will, for removing a president.
They've done it.
And this is far, his offenses are far greater than what she did seven years ago.
Her name was Puck and Hang.
Yoon has gone far beyond that, right?
I mean, this is widely considered to be an enormous overreaction.
And I would be amazed if he doesn't resign in the next 10 days.
If he chooses to stay and fight it out, I imagine the impeachment will be much faster than last time.
I bet he'll be gone by the end of January.
There are three different countries who'll be looking at this with great particular personal interest.
The United States, you have 25,000 troops there on that border.
North Korea, obviously, who might be sensing an opportunity of a very weak and vulnerable South Korea.
And China, presumably looking at all this as well.
Is there likely to be any larger repercussion from this involving any of those three countries?
Because it collapsed so fast, I'm not really sure.
Whenever the South Koreans have sort of trouble, there's concern the North Koreans might do something.
The North Koreans are a bit stretched right now because they're getting pulled into this Ukraine mess, right?
I would be surprised if the North Koreans take advantage of this.
There hasn't been anything in the last 24 hours.
But, you know, they might.
I mean, the North Koreans are great provocateurs.
The Americans, I'm a little bit surprised that the Biden administration didn't really say too much initially.
I think the Americans were kind of tepid on this.
I think the Biden people are going to get some criticism for that.
But I think to a certain extent, that's kind of understandable because nobody really knew quite what this was, right?
It's like all of a sudden the president goes on to get martial law and everybody's like, what is this?
Just like you said.
And so I think the Biden people will get a little bit of sort of grace on that one.
And again, it sort of fell apart so rapidly.
So, you know, normality has kind of come back.
You know, the stock market slipped, the wand, the currency has slipped.
But I don't see any big foreign breach at the moment because it fell apart so rapidly.
But, you know, if the tanks had stayed on the streets, then yeah, I mean, it'll be a huge opportunity for China.