Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who has gained international respect for his independence and integrity as a commentator on conflicts and foreign relations. This week, he was banned on the Twitter social media platform for challenging Western claims of a massacre in Bucha, Ukraine, allegedly carried out by Russian troops. Moscow denies the claims, as have other independent analysts who point to evidence that the incident was a false-flag provocation perpetrated by NATO-backed Ukrainian Nazi regiments to undermine Russia internationally and bolster Western objectives. It is a foreboding sign of the times that Ritter should be banned for daring to question dubious narratives. (He was later reinstated following a public outcry against censorship.)

In the following interview for Strategic Culture Foundation, he makes the crucial point that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is exposing the involvement of the U.S. and NATO in the training and weaponizing of that country’s dominant Nazi regiments. That is why Western media have been so vehement in trying to distort the conflict and blame Russia. The truth about Western dirty involvement in Ukraine would be too much to bear for the Western public.

When Ritter served as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq during the 1990s he later challenged Western media and government claims that Iraq was harboring WMDs. Those claims were used as a pretext for the U.S.-British war on Iraq launched in 1993 that cost over one million lives, destroyed a nation, created millions of displaced and millions of casualties, as well as spawned international terrorism. It later turned out that the WMD claims were based on deliberate lies for which no Western leader has been held accountable. Scott Ritter was vindicated in his warnings against that war and it is one reason why he is widely respected among international public opinion.

Ritter is a critical commentator on U.S. conflicts and foreign relations. He is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the Soviet Union implementing nuclear arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and as a UN inspector in Iraq (1991-98) overseeing the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction. He is the author of Scorpion King: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump (Clarity Press, 2020).

Interview

Question: Do you think that Russia has a just cause in launching its “special military operation” in Ukraine on February 24?

Scott Ritter: I believe Russia has articulated a cognizable claim of preemptive collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. The threat posed by NATO expansion, and Ukraine’s eight-year bombardment of the civilians of the Donbass fall under this umbrella.

Question: Do you think Russia has legitimate concerns about the Pentagon sponsoring biological weapons programs in laboratories in Ukraine?

Scott Ritter: The Pentagon denies any biological weapons program, but admits biological research programs on Ukrainian soil. Documents captured by Russia have allegedly uncovered the existence of programs the components of which could be construed as having offensive biological warfare applications. The U.S. should be required to explain the purpose of these programs.

Question: What do you make of allegations in Western media that Russian troops committed war crimes in Bucha and other Ukrainian cities? It is claimed that Russian forces summarily executed civilians.

Scott Ritter: All claims of war crimes must be thoroughly investigated, including Ukrainian allegations that Russia killed Ukrainian civilians in Bucha. However, the data available about the Bucha incident does not sustain the Ukrainian claims, and as such, the media should refrain from echoing these claims as fact until a proper investigation of the evidence is conducted, either by the media, or unbiased authorities.

Question: Do you think the alleged Russian bombing of a hospital and an art theater in Mariupol were false-flag provocations?

Scott Ritter: Both locations are available for detailed forensic examination that would either confirm or refute Ukrainian allegations that these locations were struck by Russian aerial bombs. Other data, such as the existence of any NATO radar data that would put Russian aircraft over these two locations at the time of the alleged attack, should be collected. A detailed forensic examination of each site would go a long way in proving or disproving the Ukrainian claims through the collection of weapons fragments and the evaluation of environmental samples which would show the chemical composition of any explosive used, thereby allowing a better idea of what weapon or explosive was used to destroy the sites.

Question: Western governments and mainstream media have denigrated Russian objectives to “demilitarize and deNazify” Ukraine. The West says Russia has invented or grossly exaggerated these problems as a pretext for invasion. Do you think this Western denialism is because it doesn’t want to acknowledge that Russia may indeed have legitimate concerns, and secondly that to acknowledge would mean admitting that the West is part of the problem in the current war?

Scott Ritter: The irony is that the West had thoroughly documented the extent of the Nazi ideology in Ukraine’s civil, political, and military structures during and after the 2014 Maidan coup. This documented reality was deliberately obscured by the same sources that had previously documented its existence once the Russian invasion occurred. To acknowledge the existence of this odious ideology by NATO would require NATO to acknowledge the role it played in training and equipping Azov regiment personnel since 2015. The Russian documentation of its ongoing de-Nazification effort in Ukraine is a source of continual embarrassment to NATO, as it exposes the scope and scale of NATO’s role in empowering the militarization of Nazi ideology in Ukraine.

Question: For about four months before the Russian intervention in Ukraine, the Biden administration was asserting non-stop that Moscow was planning an invasion. Do you think this is a case of great intelligence on the part of Washington or the culmination of provocation by Washington resulting in Russian military action in Ukraine?

Scott Ritter: We now know that the U.S. intelligence community under the Biden administration is committed to a policy of haphazardly “declassifying” intelligence for the purpose of shaping public opinion (so-called “getting ahead of the story”). There is no evidence that the intelligence regarding potential Russian military action was based upon anything other than politicized speculation derived from a crude analysis of Russian military dispositions void of any context. Any genuine intelligence assessment regarding the timing of any Russian military action would have incorporated the domestic political imperative of getting Duma [Russian parliamentary] approval for the deployment of Russian forces outside the borders of Russia, which carries with it the requirement of a cognizable justification for this military action under the UN Charter. This required political steps such as Donetsk and Lugansk declaring independence, and then petitioning the Russian parliament to recognize this independence, so that Russia could legitimately invoke Article 51. None of these factors was knowable when the Biden administration was issuing its warnings of imminent attack, thereby certifying the “intelligence” as being derived from fact-free speculation, and not intelligence at all.

Question: The Western media are reporting that the Russian military operation in Ukraine is floundering because it has not over-run Ukraine entirely. As a military expert, how do you see the Russian operation proceeding?

Scott Ritter: Russia is fighting a very difficult campaign hampered by its own constraint designed to limit civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure and the fact that Ukraine possesses a very well-trained military that is well led and equipped. Russia deployed some 200,000 troops in support of this operation. They are facing some 600,000 Ukrainian forces. The first phase of the Russian operation was designed to shape the battlefield to Russia’s advantage while diminishing the size and capacity of the Ukrainian ability to wage large-scale conflict. The second phase is focused on destroying the main Ukrainian force concentration in eastern Ukraine. Russia is well on its way to accomplishing this task.

Question: Do you see danger from Ukraine being turned into a proxy war by the United States and NATO partners against Russia in a way that attempts to repeat the West’s covert war in Syria or the Afghanistan war (1979-89) with the Soviet Union? There are reports of foreign legions being sent to Ukraine via NATO countries. Do you think there is a Western plan to embroil Russia in a proxy war that is aimed at sapping Russia politically, economically, and militarily?

Scott Ritter: The Ukrainian conflict is a proxy war, but one which Russia is poised to win decisively. While there appears to be a NATO/western plan to embroil Russia in a “new Afghanistan”, I don’t see any risk of this conflict dragging on for more than a few more weeks at the most before Russia accomplishes a strategic victory over Ukraine.

Question: There is an arrogant assumption among Western governments that they can impose crippling economic sanctions on Russia in a similar way to what they did on Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea among others. But would you agree that if Russia begins to impose its own counter-sanctions by restricting oil and gas exports then the Western states may end up reaping a whirlwind that is devastating to their societies?

Scott Ritter: Russia was warned well in advance about the scope and scale of U.S.-led sanctions that would be imposed if Russia were to invade Ukraine. Russia has prepared its own counter-sanction strategy which will not only defeat the Western sanctions but further strengthen Russia’s economy by decoupling it from the West and Western control/influence. We see evidence of the effectiveness of this counter-campaign as the Russian ruble is strengthened, the Russian stock market enjoys positive traction, and Europe and the U.S. flounder economically. The West has sown the wind in sanctioning Russia; Russia will not reap the whirlwind.

In the following interview for Strategic Culture Foundation, Daniel Kovalik explains how the U.S.-led war against the former Yugoslavia in 1999 was a fateful and brutal assault against the international order. It opened the door for the rapid eastward expansion of the NATO military bloc in breach of assurances to Russian leaders. And it thus created the conditions for today’s war in Ukraine. Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine is the culmination of U.S. and NATO aggression that can be traced back to their blitzkrieg against Serbia 23 years ago.

Daniel Kovalik is a world-renowned American human rights lawyer, author and commentator on international politics. He teaches international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Law. He is a human and labor rights attorney who has worked on many cases in Latin America, including helping Colombian workers sue the Coca-Cola Company over alleged widespread abuses. He writes extensively for Counterpunch and Huffington Post. Kovalik is the author of several books including The Plot to Scapegoat Russia.

Interview

Question: Western governments and media have condemned Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine as the worst inter-state violence in Europe since the Second World War. But last week we just saw the 23rd anniversary of the U.S. and NATO bombing of former Yugoslavia when American warplanes attacked Serbia for 78 days, a war that has been all but scrubbed from Western public memory. Are you surprised by the blatant double standards?

Daniel Kovalik: In truth, I’m not surprised at all. We live in a world of Orwellian double-speak which functions to create consent amongst the masses for war. It is always the case that we are encouraged to condemn the actions of those we are told are our enemies while we are to ignore and even forget the crimes of our own governments. The bombing of Serbia, premised upon claims of defending human rights, was an abomination that focused on destroying civilians and civilian infrastructure though it is remembered in the collective consciousness as some type of noble pursuit.

Question: Do you see the two wars as comparable? Russia claims it acted on the principle of self-defense of Russian-speaking people; the US and NATO claim they acted in defense of Kosovo-Albanians whom they claim were being ethnically cleansed by Serbian forces?

Daniel Kovalik: There are certainly some similarities between these two military operations as both were premised, at least in large part, on the defense of people under attack. However, there are major differences. First, Russia actually borders Ukraine, and those being attacked in Ukraine by the government of Ukraine have been ethnic Russians, most of whom are also Russian citizens. And so, Russia certainly has a greater stake in what is happening in Ukraine than the U.S., as the leader of the NATO operation in Serbia, had in that far-flung country. Second, Russia is also claiming, unlike the U.S. or other NATO countries, that it is acting in its own defense in the operations in Ukraine. Russia has seen Ukraine being used as a staging group in order to destabilize if not destroy Russia, and the U.S. has been open about those aims, including in statements by American President Joe Biden himself in the last several days. The U.S. and NATO had no such self-defense concerns in Serbia and did not even claim such. Third, Russia has actually taken pains in Ukraine to avoid civilian deaths and casualties while NATO specifically targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Question: The U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia and its capital Belgrade endured for 78 days; Russian forces have been striking Ukrainian locations for just over 38 days. How do the two operations differ in terms of damage inflicted, including civilian casualties?

Daniel Kovalik: Again, at least so far, Russia has tried to avoid attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure while NATO actually targeted them. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there haven’t been extensive civilian casualties in Ukraine as well as destruction to civilian buildings. And the war in Ukraine is still ongoing so we will have to see how the war progresses or devolves to know the full extent of damage to that country. That is why it is critical to find a negotiated solution to this conflict as soon as possible.

Question: Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. Secretary of State who died last week on the 23rd anniversary of NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia, was a major player in the supposed peace talks – the Rambouillet talks in February 1999 – that led up to the NATO campaign in March 1999. Why did the diplomatic effort fail to prevent the war?

Daniel Kovalik: We know very well that the peace talks in the former Yugoslavia failed precisely because the U.S. wanted them to fail. There were two separate peace agreements that could have prevented much of the bloodshed which took place there and the U.S. went out of its way to scuttle both of these agreements. The United States did so because it wanted a war in the former Yugoslavia just as it has wanted a war in Ukraine. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, the U.S. wanted the war to be able to destroy the last vestiges of socialism in Europe. It also wanted the war to show the world that it could go to war unilaterally and without UN Security Council authorization. That is, it wanted the war precisely so that it could show the world that it could invade any country it wanted and at any time. This was, indeed, a war against the international legal order.

Question: Do you think the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 was pivotal for the subsequent rapid eastwards expansion of NATO as a military organization?

Daniel Kovalik: I certainly think the bombing of Serbia facilitated the eastward expansion of NATO. It also set the precedent for NATO to serve as the United States’ air force throughout the world, including in places beyond Europe, such as Libya.

Question: Would you assess that the U.S./NATO bombing of Serbia is at the root of the present conflict in Ukraine? In other words, the ongoing war in Ukraine is but one part of a bigger global picture?

Daniel Kovalik: The bombing of Serbia continues to linger in the minds of the Russians who were horrified by a brother country in Europe being bombed by NATO. The memory of this event is certainly a motivating factor in Russia’s fears that it too could be a victim of NATO, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has said as much quite recently.  And so, certainly, that bombing played a role in leading to the conflict in Ukraine.

Question: The late Madeleine Albright, like many U.S. politicians, was a big advocate of “American exceptionalism” and America’s right to unilaterally use violence to achieve its geopolitical goals. Is that doctrine at the heart of today’s international conflict between the West and Russia and indeed China?

Daniel Kovalik: Yes, it certainly is. The idea that the U.S. is the “essential nation”, as both Albright and former President Barack Obama claimed, has been used to justify the United States’ claim to be able to act unilaterally against any nation in the world in order to protect its perceived interests. Of course, other countries have interests too, including the interest to have peace and security – these being the most fundamental rights of any nation as set forth in the United Nations Charter that was established in 1945 after the Second World War. The U.S.’ ceaseless aggression has destroyed this right of nations and the UN system itself, and countries like Russia and China are keen on restoring this right. The UN Charter, by its terms, is premised on the notion that all nations are equal under international law. The U.S. has claimed that, somehow, it is more equal than others, and it has acted on this claim to the detriment of millions around the world. The world is now pushing back against this.

Despite all the hysterical talk about a ‘Russian invasion’ of Ukrainian territory, Russian President Vladimir Putin, using nothing more dangerous than a ballpoint pen, calmly brought the Ukrainian stalemate to its logical next phase, which was to recognize the independence of the Donbass with the full support of Russian peacekeepers.

Had Kiev been sincere about resolving the standoff, and keeping the eastern part of the country in the fold, it would have demonstrated its commitment to the Minsk Protocol from the beginning. Sadly, proof of that devotion never materialized.

On Tuesday, Russian lawmakers passed by an overwhelming margin a set of agreements to begin the process of political and military support for the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. That same day, the parliaments of the two regions ratified the ‘Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Russian Federation.’

Global affairs analyst, Patrick Henningsen, has agreed to discuss Moscow’s move to recognize the independence of the Donbass, which distanced itself from Kiev following the U.S.-backed Maidan uprising of 2014. That tragic moment in European history saw the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovich swept from power.

Question: What do you make of the Western media version of events that Moscow is engaged in a “land grab” in Ukraine?

Patrick Henningsen: It’s not very surprising considering the vilification that Russia and Vladimir Putin have had to endure by the U.S. mainstream media and even Hollywood for many years now. This has made it easier for the media to peddle to the public truly outlandish stories like, for example, how Russia has “kill lists” prepared for Ukrainians after it launches a full-scale invasion of the capital Kiev. This sort of reckless propaganda is mostly for domestic consumption – especially with a critical U.S. election quickly approaching in November – with the purpose of trying to bog down Russia in some sort of disastrous conflict with its neighbor, something that Moscow has said many times that it does not want or need. The sad reality of the situation is that the United States and NATO does not really have the best interests of the Ukrainian people at heart. The West is simply playing for geopolitical advantage, plain and simple.

Question: How did the situation get to point where Moscow was forced to recognize the Donbass independence?

Patrick Henningsen: Ever since the adoption of the so-called Minsk Protocol in September 2014, it has become increasingly clear over time that the Western powers, together with Ukraine, were not committed to its initiatives. These included, among other goals, a ceasefire between the combatants, and the gradual decentralization of power with greater self-governance going to the Donetsk and Luhansk republics. What we had in effect was a stalemate that has turned into a dangerous situation of late with all of the Western propaganda about an imminent “Russian invasion.” At the same time, Western governments were funneling weapons into Ukraine. Moscow finally came to the inescapable conclusion that such a volatile situation smack on its border could not continue indefinitely.

Question: What does the future hold for Ukraine and the newly recognized republics?

Patrick Henningsen: Ukraine has actually been victimized to a high degree by the Western propaganda campaign, which incessantly warned that the Russians were about to invade. Finally, in order to calm down the war hysteria, [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky was forced to say that there was no indication that the Russians were planning to invade. At one point he even asked the Biden administration to show Kiev some concrete evidence that plans for an assault on Ukraine were underway. Of course, Zelensky never received such proof.

Meanwhile, the war hysteria from the Western capitals placed a huge economic drag on Ukraine that it will be hard-pressed to crawl back from. Will Kiev find itself dependent on ever more Western loans just to keep the country afloat?

As for the people of Donbass, aside from their independence, they have the knowledge that they are no longer alone in the world. In fact, thousands of these people are applying now for Russian citizenship while many women and children have been evacuated to Russia proper as the hostilities in the region approach the boiling point.

Question: What do the Western powers stand to lose by failing to support the Minsk Protocol while provoking Russia?

Patrick Henningsen: Well, already we’re hearing reports that Germany has suspended the certification process of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a joint project between Russia and Germany that was finished last year. However, the final leg of the process was delayed, and it seems the United States, which has been opposed to the project from the start, played no small part in that setback. That is going to make gas prices exorbitantly high for many Europeans.

Meanwhile, we can expect to see a new wave of sanctions being aimed at Russia that will only serve to hurt consumers both at home and abroad. The Western countries will suffer every bit as much as Russia will, and quite possibly more considering that Russia has proven its ability to weather sanctions due to the growth of its domestic production base. It’s regrettable that the situation between the West and Russia deteriorated to such a point when it could have been easily avoided had only the West demonstrated a willingness to adhere to the Minsk Protocol.

Author Patrick Henningsen is an American global affairs analyst and founder of independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire, and is host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR). Over the last decade, his work has been featured with a number of international publications and TV networks.

The Cold War is back with a vengeance. The current impasse between the United States and Russia over the Ukraine crisis is running the risk of an all-out war in Europe, a war that could escalate into nuclear Armageddon. The crisis is wholly manufactured by Washington’s geopolitical power calculations – claims made against Russia about planning to invade Ukraine are baseless if not absurd. The impasse reflects an impoverishment of diplomacy and respect for international law, and a reckless tendency to militarize bilateral relations. This is the manifestation of Cold War thinking, primarily on the U.S. side.

In the following interview, Martin Schotz, a respected Massachusetts-based author on the assassination of President John F Kennedy, explores the systematic basis for Cold War logic. He contends that the United States’ political class is locked in an entrenched Cold War mentality that serves its hyper-militarized economy. Cold War politics necessitates conflict and war in international relations, which is all too clearly demonstrated by the present crisis over Ukraine between the U.S. and Russia.

The depth of this Cold War logic of the accompanying national security state is illustrated by the shocking murder of President John F Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. His murderers and the institutional coverup that followed were motivated by Kennedy’s growing opposition to the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The fact of JFK’s murder and the systematic denial by media is an indication of how deeply engrained Cold War thinking is in the American political establishment. That embedded logic explains why U.S. relations with Russia continue to be dominated by seemingly irrational hostility. Why do peaceful relations seem so elusive, so relentlessly thwarted? Is it really because of malign Russians?

The inability of the Biden administration, or any U.S. administration for that matter, to conduct normal, peaceful, diplomatic relations with Russia within the bounds of the UN Charter and international law is down to the intransigent Cold War logic of the American imperial state. More than 58 years after the brutal murder of Kennedy, the imperial state persists more than ever as can be seen in the reckless hostility by Washington towards Moscow, as well as towards Beijing, Tehran, Havana, Bogota and others designated as “enemies” of presumed U.S. hegemony.

Martin Schotz co-authored the seminal book History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy (1996). It is widely acclaimed as a definitive record of how and why the state murdered Kennedy.

Schotz, MD, retired, previously practiced psychiatry in Boston. He has a BA in Mathematics from Carleton College, and an MD from the University of Pennsylvania. Following training in Adult and Child Psychiatry at Boston University Medical Center, he was a graduate student in the University Professors Program at Boston University. In addition to practicing psychiatry, he is a playwright, essayist, short story writer, and amateur jazz drummer.

He writes for the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord, as well as Massachusetts Peace Action. A recent article is entitled “Understanding and Resisting the New Cold War”.

An important theme for Schotz is the political and societal effects on the United States from the mass denial that continues in relation to Kennedy’s murder. From his 1996 book cited above is this profound insight which is as relevant today as it ever was:

“As citizens who have turned away for thirty years [now nearly sixty years] from the truth of the murder of our elected head of state, we should not be surprised that today we find our nation in intellectual, political, and moral chaos. Confronting the truth of President Kennedy’s assassination and its coverup is but one small step on a long path out of that chaos and toward healing, a path along which we must confront the true nature of our democracy and the reality of what our nation has become for its own citizens and for people throughout the world. Such a process of healing is not pleasant. It is a difficult and painful path, but it is a necessary one. History will not absolve us.”

Interview

Question: You are a long-time observer of Cold War politics between the United States and the former Soviet Union. How would you compare the current deterioration and tensions in relations between the U.S.-led Western states and Russia?

Martin Schotz: I’m afraid, if anything, I would say matters are worse because of the deterioration of conditions in the United States. On the one hand, we have the ever-growing control of the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Think Tank Complex. Both major parties are wedded to the military establishment and espouse Cold War propaganda with little dissent. When you combine this with the weakening influence of the liberal establishment and the growing openly fascist movement that combines the Republican Party and white supremacy there seems to be tremendous potential for instability in this country. The peace movement, such as it is, needs to reach out for support and allies wherever it can. And we need to keep in mind Martin Luther King Junior’s concept of “agape”, that is, faith in the capacity of your enemy to be transformed.

Question: The Cold War was supposed to have ended nearly 30 years ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why do you think it persists three decades on in the form of fraught and hostile relations between Washington and Moscow?

Martin Schotz: In my opinion, it is a myth that the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cold War from the beginning was always about U.S./Western hegemony. No other system can be permitted to exist that might be an alternative to the capitalist system. When the Soviet Union collapsed, somehow Cuba didn’t. And because Cuba represents another way – another economic and political system, true national sovereignty, etc., – the U.S. continued to demonize Cuba and kept its embargo intact. To me, this is evidence that the Cold War didn’t end. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it wasn’t so clear what direction China would be moving in. And the Cold Warriors probably thought they might be able to bring China into the U.S.-dominated capitalist system. Of course, they assumed that Russia would be part of the system with Yeltsin and his successors. But when China decided to pursue its own course and Russia re-emerged under Vladimir Putin, the Cold War, which had been up to then somewhat quiet, suddenly flared up again. There is a quote from prominent Cold War diplomat and historian George Kennan from the 1980s in which he deplored the establishment’s negative view of the USSR that could be written today. All you have to do is take the passage and substitute “Russia” for “Soviet Union”. Here is a long quote from Kennan’s book The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age (1982):

“I find the view of the Soviet Union that prevails today in large portions of our governmental and journalistic establishments so extreme, so subjective, so far removed from what any sober scrutiny of external reality would reveal, that it is not only ineffective but dangerous as a guide to political action.

“This endless series of distortions and oversimplifications; this systematic dehumanization of the leadership of another great country; this routine exaggeration of Moscow’s military capabilities and of the supposed iniquity of Soviet intentions: this monotonous misrepresentation of the nature and the attitudes of another great people – and a long-suffering people at that, sorely tried by the vicissitudes of this past century; this ignoring of their pride, their hopes – yes, even of their illusions (for they have their illusions, just as we have ours, and illusions too, deserve respect); this reckless application of the double standard to the judgment of Soviet conduct and our own, this failure to recognize, finally, the communality of many of their problems and ours as we both move inexorably into the modern technological age: and the corresponding tendency to view all aspects of the relationship in terms of a supposed total and irreconcilable conflict of concerns and of aims; these, I believe, are not the marks of the maturity and discrimination one expects of the diplomacy of a great power; they are the marks of an intellectual primitivism and naivety unpardonable in a great government. I use the word naivety, because there is the naivety of cynicism and suspicion, just as there is the naivety of innocence.

“And we shall not be able to turn these things around as they should be turned, on the plane of military and nuclear rivalry, until we learn to correct these childish distortions – until we correct our tendency to see in the Soviet Union only a mirror in which we look for the reflection of our own virtue – until we consent to see there another great people, one of the world’s greatest, in all its complexity and variety, embracing the good with the bad, a people whose life, whose views, whose habits, whose fears and aspirations, whose successes and failures, are the products, just as ours are the products, not of any inherent iniquity but of the relentless discipline of history, tradition, and national experience. If we insist on demonizing these Soviet leaders – on viewing them as total and incorrigible enemies, consumed only with their fear and hatred of us and dedicated to nothing other than our destruction – that, in the end, is the way we shall assuredly have them, if for no other reason than that our view of them allows for nothing else, either for them or for us.”

Question: As the author yourself of a ground-breaking book on the assassination of President John F Kennedy, you argue that he was murdered by powerful U.S. state elements precisely because Kennedy was beginning to seriously challenge Cold War policies. Can you elaborate on some of the peace initiatives that he was embarking on with his Soviet counterparts?

Martin Schotz: Kennedy went through a gradual and ultimately radical transformation over the three years of his presidency. He initially as a senator had made a speech against colonialism that had raised some eyebrows, but during the campaign for the presidency, he seemed to be attacking Nixon from the right. Eisenhower as he was leaving office had warned of the growing influence of the military-industrial complex, and once Kennedy was in office it didn’t take long before he began to tangle with the CIA and the military. His refusal to allow U.S. forces to rescue the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961 was the first example. He tried to fire Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, over Dulles’ deceit in the incident. But as David Talbot’s book on Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard, demonstrates in great detail Dulles in fact continued to meet with his associates even though Kennedy had officially removed him as director of the agency. Then you had a little-known agreement signed between a representative of Kennedy and a representative of then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev known as the McCloy-Zorin Agreement. This outlined a plan for complete worldwide disarmament in stages. It was brought to the UN and unanimously endorsed by the UN General Assembly. At the time, I am not sure how seriously Kennedy took this agreement. But you also have at this time the private correspondence that Kennedy and Khrushchev were conducting, which allowed them to get a better understanding of each other out of public view. Then you have the Cuban Missile Crisis during October 1962. The pressure on Kennedy to launch a war against Cuba and possibly a first strike on the Soviet Union was enormous. But he resisted, showing great independence, and was able to resolve the crisis by negotiating with Khrushchev. That crisis was a real turning point. Kennedy saw how callous his military advisors were to the possibility of millions of deaths in a war. The turning point was quite radical. At this stage, I think the McCloy-Zorin Agreement really started to mean something. Kennedy was reportedly pressing his aides for plans for general disarmament in stages. Then in June 1963, you have the American University speech. This speech was a profound attempt on the part of the president to start educating the American people on the subject of world peace. To me it is perhaps the greatest speech by an American president and the principles articulated in that speech are universal and eternal. Those principles of mutual peace and coexistence, disarmament and an end to militarism, are as relevant today as ever.

Question: You have pointed to the bold declaration of peace by Kennedy in the American University speech in Washington DC on June 10, 1963, as a watershed moment. In that 27-minute address, President Kennedy talked about the pursuit of peace and an end to futile Cold War animosity. Do you think that was the moment he signed his own death warrant in the eyes of U.S. political enemies?

Martin Schotz: After the speech was delivered, Khrushchev was so impressed by it that he had it reprinted throughout the Soviet Union, so virtually every Soviet citizen knew about it. That is something that needs to happen in the United States today. Amongst other things, Kennedy announced in the speech a moratorium on nuclear testing in the atmosphere and followed it by negotiating a test ban treaty. Though the U.S. public opinion was initially solidly against the treaty, Kennedy’s organizing and speeches won people over and the treaty was approved by the Senate. So you have here a leader, the president of the United States who is really part of the establishment and has someone like John McCloy working on the one hand and he has Norman Cousins working with him on the other hand. McCloy was as establishment as you can get, and Cousins was one of the founders of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. Cousins was Kennedy’s personal emissary between himself, Pope John XXIII and Khrushchev. Cousins’ book, The Improbable Triumvirate, is an important record of what was going on in 1963. Cousins was a co-author of the American University speech. Well, you can see what a radical turn was being taken against the Cold War. And the CIA and the Military establishment were not about to have it. You know if Kennedy had been given more time and the American people had really gotten more of a taste for peace, a certain momentum might have developed.

Question: The JFK assassination is a profoundly shocking revelation of U.S. state power; that an elected American president was murdered by agents of the state on the grounds that he wanted to normalize bilateral relations with the Soviet Union and genuinely end the Cold War. Does that shocking, brutal elimination of a U.S. president by his own state explain why bilateral relations have remained dominated and distorted ever since by Cold War dogma?

Martin Schotz: Well, we not only have the president murdered by his own national security state, but we have the government issue an obviously fraudulent report, the Warren Report. We also have the established institutions of society, the media, the universities, and so on, they all turn away and ignore the fact that this has happened. The President is murdered and the government issues an obviously fraudulent report that is accepted. What does that say about our society? John McCloy one of the Warren Commission members was quoted as saying: “The primary purpose of the Warren Commission was to prove that the United States was not a banana republic, where a government could be changed by conspiracy.”

Question: Was there something of an echo of this systematic hostility when former President Donald Trump vowed to pursue more normal relations with Russia? His official encounters with President Putin elicited howls of condemnation across the U.S. media. On the surface, this disapproval of Trump’s outreach was said to be due to “Russiagate” and alleged Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 presidential election, but would you agree that it was more due to a deeper American state intransigence simply towards any kind of normalization of relations between Washington and Moscow?

Martin Schotz: Nothing that Trump says means anything as far as I am concerned. From my point of view, he can hardly keep an idea in his head for more than a few minutes. So I don’t want to give him any attention. “Russiagate” was a Democratic Party concoction that was aimed at distracting from serious attention to how Hillary Clinton had managed to lose to an imbecile. The real reason for her loss was the abandonment over decades by the Democratic Party of its working-class base. “Russiagate”, as Putin himself said, was really a matter of U.S. domestic politics in which Russia was being used as a scapegoat.

Question: It seems the United States’ modern political formation is inherently and relentlessly driven by Cold War thinking. Russia, China and other foreign states are designated enemies by Washington often without credible justification. There seems to be a permanent ideology of hostility and war in the U.S. as a nation-state. What are the underlying causal reasons for this systematic mindset?

Martin Schotz: Over the years, the U.S. economy has been increasingly militarized. So there needs to be a narrative that justifies this war economy and that’s what we have. Military spending is everywhere. It is in Hollywood. It is “defense contractors”, aka “merchants of death”, buying congressional representatives. Then the service that the military performs is to make the world safe for unbridled corporate activity. It is a very daunting problem.

Question: Do you ever see the U.S. transcending its fixation on Cold War politics? What needs to change to make that happen?

Martin Schotz: What needs to happen is the political leadership coming to the conclusion that we cannot dominate the world, that we need the United Nations and we need international law. Can they come to understand that none of the problems that are facing humanity can be solved with military weapons? It is not beyond the realm of possibility that sanity could reign. And it is the task of the peace movement to reach as many people at all levels with this message.

Qiao Liang is a former People’s Liberation Army Air Force major general that became famous in 1999 with the book “Unrestricted Warfare” co-authored with his colleague Wang Xiangsui. Western media immediately presented the study as the herald of a new kind of war waged by China against America. The authors tackled the concept of asymmetrical war against a stronger enemy, foreshadowing future events like the attack of 9-11. A few years ago, Qiao wrote a new book, “The Arc of Empire”, translated now into Italian for the first time outside China. The study is edited by retired Italian lieutenant general Fabio Mini, Commander of the NATO-led KFOR in Kosovo from 2002 to 2003. Mini also introduced in Italy “Unrestricted Warfare”, his Italian foreword is now translated in the last Chinese edition. Qiao’s new work is a study of the American superpower. It explains its incredible success and the reasons for its unavoidable decline. According to Qiao, the United States has overcome the colonialist imperial logic of the 19th century British Empire by adopting a revolutionary system of economic domination, which has reached its peak with the end of Bretton Woods agreements in 1971. The power of the dollar as a universal currency supports the first financial empire in history. The Pilgrims Fathers’ City upon a Hill loved by Reagan, the image of American exceptionalism is, in reality, The Mint upon the Hill. With this “colonial financial economy”, American wealth is paid for by the rest of the world. Qiao writes that Pentagon’s “endless wars” are designed to ensure “that not only do dollars flow smoothly out of the country but also that capital moving around the world returns to the United States”. We have asked general Mini to introduce Qiao’s conception of the U.S. Empire and its decline.

During a video conference in early December, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed the need “of accelerating efforts to form an independent financial infrastructure for servicing trading operations between Russia and China”. Do you think this is the beginning of the end of the dollar system?

I don’t rule it out. Considering that Qiao Liang wrote the book in 2015, he must be credited with great foresight and political influence. The two leaders are concretely interested in ending the hegemony of the dollar. As Qiao says, the dollar’s waning may mark the beginning of the end of U.S. economic and geopolitical hegemony. However, this does not mean that the attempt will succeed. The Americans could threaten or implement retaliation, not necessarily only commercially. For now, the common intention of Putin and Xi is to bypass the dollar’s brokerage in their bilateral trade only. But China and Russia rely heavily on exports, and their currencies credibility is not so strong. Despite U.S. threats and penalties imposed on its commerce, China is not in a hurry. It aims to pursue an international agreement that recognises at least two other currencies as reference for trade in addition to the dollar: euro and yuan. Russia is in a different situation: it realises that the U.S. counters any attempt to safeguard its sovereignty and regional interests. Therefore, it suffers a triple penalty: two in the economic field and one in the political field. The export resources are depleted in quantity and price (due to demand contraction). Its imports are penalised by prices (increasing due to the lower supply) and payments in dollars. The third, and most important, is the political penalty: submitting to external blackmail causes a loss of credibility and influence. Russia has had to bite the U.S.-NATO bullet in continental Europe for years now. Detachment from the dollar has become a question of political survival for Moscow. However, Russia knows that this measure is necessary but not sufficient. The country faces a U.S.-NATO offensive made of provocations, erosion of territories, border destabilisation and support to internal subversion that requires to be managed on the level of security and military power. While China believes it has time to act on the economic and financial level, Russia must demonstrate that it can oppose serious provocations also militarily. The different Russian and Chinese attitudes find a concordance of territorial, economic and geopolitical interests in Central Asia, the energy sector and military-industrial cooperation. The EU might be the balancing power in this situation, even for Russia and China. The euro could become the new equivalent currency in the world. But currently, the Union’s internal political weakness, its subservience to the Americans and the permanent delegation of its security to NATO are making this scenario impossible.

The return of industries moved abroad, first evoked by President Obama, appears structurally impossible. Qiao sees it as another aspect of American decay. Even if U.S. experiences new recoveries, they will be “jobless”. Technological innovation and finance have reached “their energetic limit”; there will only be a decline from now on. Is it a realistic judgment?

It seems reasonable to me, especially for the period in which it was formulated. Today it would perhaps be revisited but not completely rejected. The U.S. is experiencing one crisis after another, yet it is not holding back ambition or adventurism. Indeed, much of manufacturing is lost forever, but IT and technology dominance is still strong, and the financial dominance is huge. The U.S. trade deficit has two aspects: it favours the Chinese and, at the same time, induces Washington to contain China. The manufacturing deficit can be balanced by exports of technologies and the energy sector. Since the American stranglehold on Russia and its resources began, the United States has multiplied gas exports to Europe. The observation that any economic recovery will be “jobless” is correct to those who think of work and employment as tools for growth and prosperity. Almost the entire world agrees. But the U.S. is an exception in this as well. They have long abandoned the idea of giving work to increase production and have never said that the wealth should be better distributed. On the contrary, the concentration of wealth in a few hands facilitates its control and use. They have long replaced employment benefits with those of exploitation and speculation. Work is now a social safety net, just like the layoff funds. Few people’s wealth and success are illusorily experienced as collective goods that the whole country should be proud of.

One of the most surprising thesis in the book is that Washington is more interested in destroying the euro’s Europe than China. From the NATO war on Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the birth of the European currency in 1991 to today’s confrontation with Moscow in Ukraine, Washington is simultaneously pursuing the goal of encircling Russia and damaging the EU with the help of the Europeans themselves. The prospect of an economic relationship between Russia and Europe, naturally favoured by geopolitics, is thus destroyed. Is this a conspiracy theory?

No, it is a theorem proven by the facts. In the wake of Trump’s tariffs offensive against Europe, some European analysts claimed that the Union was an Americans’ idea. Hence the U.S. cannot want its destruction. It is a historical falsehood and a clumsy attempt to reassure Europeans when doubts are growing about the loyalty of their bigger ally. The idea of supporting the formation of a kind of European Union came to the Americans when they decided to launch the Marshall Plan’s aid program after WWII. It was a purpose of convenience: they needed a united counterpart to manage the aid. Furthermore, the fear that the USSR would take control of Europe was the reason for the initial support for the European Union. Washington made sure to stop any European initiative that wasn’t to its benefit. The contrast remained all along with the Cold War but under the radar. It was clear when the NATO blockade transformed the possible Soviet threat of nuclear retaliation against the U.S. in a nuclear and conventional war in Europe. After the implosion of the USSR, the contrast increased when NATO assumed the double task of expanding to the East and preventing Europe from acquiring an autonomous defence capability. NATO’s ploy was the Partnership for Peace program (PFP), which offered non-NATO countries the possibility of military cooperation. For a few years, Russia, an observer inside NATO, followed the program with suspicion. Countries formerly part of the Warsaw Pact entered into the Alliance, while others were offered to be part of the EU as a first step towards admission. On the other side of the border, Moscow found new Europeans that opposed Russia and strictly followed the anti-Russian U.S. directives even to the detriment of the rest of the Union. For the last ten years, the U.S. has prevented any European autonomy. Above all, they averted the possibility that the euro could challenge the dollar. For this reason, America will not miss any opportunity to force Europe to cut both political and economic relations with Moscow and Beijing. Such manoeuvres are forcing Russia and China to increase their military power to shift the confrontation to the geopolitical and strategic level, where military deterrence may contain the economic threat.

Italy has a strong dependence on Washington and hosts U.S. atomic weapons on its territory. Now an American fund wants to buy TIM’s network, the most important telecommunications company in the country. It seems an excellent example of the looting of the family jewels that, according to Qiao, the Dollar’s Empire cyclically carries out at the expense of the rest of the world. Is it so?

He is right in saying that the dollar sucks up the wealth produced by people’s sweat in exchange for a piece of bread. He argues that the dollar does not fluctuate only concerning the economic or geopolitical situation but follows a cyclical pattern that affects the economy and geopolitics. This Qiao’s brilliant insight is now a phenomenon verified by Japanese and Chinese researchers. These studies have found that the dollar index varies downward for thirty-two months and upward for an equivalent period. The first interval begins with large amounts of money entering the financial market. It causes interest rates to fall, greater access to credit and increased productivity by those in the world who have taken advantage of the liquidity. So the wealth increases, and there are significant “economic booms”. But this wealth cannot be left in the hands of the beneficiaries. So it begins the interval in which the dollar must return to the U.S. The monetary flow decreases, interest rates increase, American securities become profitable, and new investments flow to U.S. companies. The “dollar cycle” is completed in 65 months, during which the U.S. profits both from the “roller coaster” imposed on global finance and from speculation based on the return of capital. But we should have no illusions, the appropriation of other people’s wealth is not an exclusive feature of the American dollar. Large Chinese corporations are following closely behind or perhaps have already surpassed U.S. multinationals in hoarding the resources and labour of others. But, even accepting Qiao Liang’s proposal to establish a global regime based on three reference currencies: dollar, euro and yuan, the economic pillage would not be reduced or eliminated. So the real nature of the problem is not the currency but who guarantees its convertibility and stability. According to Qiao Liang and many others, providing these guarantees for the dollar is a country that lives beyond its capabilities, does not allow competition, exercises political absolutism. To maintain its lifestyle, the U.S. has no qualms in prevaricating, preventing the development of others, waging war against everyone, enemies and friends, allies and opponents. Qiao identifies in the dollar’s hegemony the key to dismantling this power with the means of finance and the potential of the Internet. The Chinese general is stunned by how the U.S. exercises its global hegemony: convincing the world that the threatening and warmongering countries are Russia and China and not them.

The Western empire-builders are weakened and exposed in the eyes of their own populations and thus are disarmed politically to pursue confrontation.

Author and commentator Alex Krainer explains in the following interview why Russia is now strong enough to take a definitive stand against the United States and its Western empire-builders. This is the wider historical context for high-level negotiations being conducted this week between Russia and the U.S. and NATO in which Moscow has asserted red lines for its national security.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S.-led Western powers became deluded with arrogant entitlement. As Krainer points out, the Western empire-builders presumed to have the right to wage wars and flout international law. For much of the past three-decade period, Russia was too weak economically and politically to challenge this reckless aggression. But now it has grown strong enough to “check-mate the empire’s global ambitions”. This is why war or regime change in Russia has become an obsessive goal for the U.S. and Western partners. It accounts for the relentless sanctions, Russophobia and surge in tensions over Ukraine and more recently Kazakhstan.

Russia is perceived as an obstacle to Western control over the strategically vital Eurasian continent. The prize of Eurasia has long been coveted by Western imperialists, from the British Empire’s Sir Halford Mackinder to the U.S. strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski. As Krainer notes, it was this imperial calculation by the Anglo-American capitalists that led to the building up of Nazi Germany as a bludgeon to destroy the Soviet Union and purportedly to give the empire-builders global hegemony. This imperial machination led to World War II and the greatest conflagration in human history with as many as 85 million dead. The Soviet Union and China accounted for more than half of the death toll.

Today, the Western imperialists are prepared to start another catastrophic war, even if it risks a nuclear Armageddon, contends Krainer. But he says that Russia is strong enough to now force the Western imperialists into political detente. He believes that the Russian leadership has calculated that the Western empire-builders are weakened and exposed in the eyes of their own populations and thus are disarmed politically to pursue confrontation.

Alex Krainer is a commodities trader and hedge fund manager whose market analysis can be found at I-System Trend Following. He is also a commentator on international politics at thenakedhedgie.com. A recent article reassesses the British “appeasement policy” towards Hitler in the 1930s arguing the real aim was to weaponize the Third Reich against the Soviet Union. He refers to this deeper historical account to demolish false analogies made today by Western politicians and pundits who absurdly compare Russia and Putin with Nazi Germany and Hitler. Krainer is the author of the ground-breaking book “Grand Deception: the Truth About Bill Browder, the Magnitsky Act and Anti-Russian Sanctions”.

Alex Krainer

Interview

Question: Some American and European politicians are demanding that there should be “no appeasement” towards Russia over the mounting tensions and security crisis regarding Ukraine and Europe generally. The insinuation is that Russia is comparable to Nazi Germany in the 1930s by allegedly posing an existential threat to Europe’s security. You point out that there is a grossly distorted analogy here with how Britain and France are accused of “appeasement” of Nazi Germany in the lead-up to the Second World War. Can you explain?

Alex Krainer: Western powers seem to have largely lost institutional brakes on waging war. Someone cries “human rights,” and we seem prepared to obliterate entire nations with hardly any debate, discussion, or any long-term plan. The consent for war, or “kinetic action”, is simply contrived by myriad think-tanks, often directly or indirectly funded by the military-industrial complex. With unhindered access to the media, these organizations produce rhetoric that rationalizes hostility, demonization of targeted adversaries and justifications for war. Today, as tensions with Russia have escalated to a boiling point, some of them draw historical parallels between today’s Russia and Nazi Germany. Among others, Victoria Nuland and Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger have recently invoked Britain’s 1938 policy of appeasement that caused the destruction of Czechoslovakia and empowered Hitler. The insinuation is that today, Ukraine is Czechoslovakia, Donbas is Sudetenland and that Vladimir Putin is Hitler. If the parallels were valid, they would imply that we should pay almost any price to avoid repeating Neville Chamberlain’s errors of judgment that plunged Europe into the tragedy of World War II. Of course, the parallels are entirely false, but unfortunately, this is not widely understood.

Question: Going deeper into the history of that fateful pre-WWII period, you contend that the British Conservative government of Neville Chamberlain was not so much “appeasing” Hitler’s Nazi Germany but rather London was covertly green lighting Berlin’s expansionism and the annexation of the Czech Sudetenland territory. Therefore, can British policy be blamed for starting the war in Europe and the subsequent criminal aggression of Nazi Germany?

Alex Krainer: London was definitely covertly green lighting Berlin’s expansionism. However, it’s quite possible that they did much more than that. Today we have compelling evidence that Hitler was actually recruited, cultivated and empowered to carry water for the globalist agenda of the empire builders based on Wall Street and the City of London. In fact, Western powers do this as a matter of course: they incubate nationalistic leaders they can plant in different nations but who would remain loyal to them. Examples include Russia’s Alexey Navalny and Venezuela’s Juan Guaido. The problem was that Adolf Hitler was massively empowered with capital and military technology and became something of a monster in the heart of Europe. He also had his own ideas about his historical mission and didn’t hesitate to bite the hands that had fed him. But some of these facts remain obscured to this day as the victors made sure to write a sanitized and airbrushed history of World War II. With regard to appeasement, the distortion was that the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain only appeased Hitler and sacrificed Czechoslovakia in order to preserve peace in Europe. In other words, Chamberlain had good intentions but made a bad error of judgment. This is not what happened; Chamberlain and his foreign policy cabal which included Lord Halifax, Sir Horace Wilson, Sir John Simon, Lord Runciman, and Sir Samuel Hoare took a very active role in the negotiations between Hitler’s Germany and Czechoslovakia and the result – Germany’s taking over of Czechoslovakia’s most developed and most industrialized region of Sudetenland – was exactly what they had intended.

Question: It is not widely known, as you point out, that British and American finance capital was heavily supporting the Third Reich in the run-up to WWII. What were the geopolitical objectives behind this support from Britain and the United States for Nazi Germany?

Alex Krainer: As with every empire, the British Empire’s objective was world domination, and the arrangement they had envisioned and planned was a “three-block” system. As Lord Halifax articulated it after the Munich conference in September 1938, the three blocks included control of the far-Eastern dominions in alliance with Japan, control of the Euro-Atlantic block in alliance with the United States and the control of central and eastern European continent through Germany as the hegemon in that region. Germany was also intended as the bludgeon to wield against and destroy Russia and thus eliminate the British Empire’s perennial rival in controlling the Eurasian landmass. The empire builders have not given up on this three-block vision of the new global order, which is perhaps most visibly exemplified by the Trilateral Commission, co-founded in 1973 by Zbigniew Brzezinski. The difference is that today the agenda is being pursued through ostensibly democratic institutions of the European Union while still consistently empowering Germany as the dominant power among the supposed equals. And Russia remains the rival to destroy either through war or regime change. However, it seems to me that their game is up and the fantasy of dominating the world has receded beyond reach today.

Question: If we apply that kind of understanding of history to today, are you contending that the United States, Britain and other NATO powers are trying to similarly contain Russia through fomenting tensions and aggression in Europe, albeit in the language of “defending Ukraine”?

Alex Krainer: There’s no doubt about that – the more you pay attention, the more obvious it is. The foundational principle of the conflict between Russia and the U.S. and Britain is the struggle for control of the Eurasian landmass which has been the empire builders’ overarching imperative ever since Sir Halford Mackinder explicitly formulated it in 1904 in his Heartland Theory. In “Democratic Ideals and Reality,” he wrote that, “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-island; who rules the World-island controls the world.” Since then, the empire changed headquarters from London to Washington DC, but this imperative has not changed. Zbigniew Brzezinski reaffirmed it again in his 1997 book, “The Grand Chessboard,” explaining also the empire builders’ rationale for this ambition: “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. … About 75% of the world’s people live in Eurasia and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60% of the world’s GDP and about 3/4ths of the world’s known energy resources.”

This obsession is part and parcel of Western policy toward Russia continuously to this day. In August 2018 in a briefing to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee by the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Wess Mitchell stated that the “central aim of the [Trump] administration’s foreign policy is to defend U.S. domination of Eurasian landmass as the foremost U.S. national security interest and to prepare the nation for this challenge.” Mitchell also said that the administration was “working with our close ally the UK to form an international coalition for coordinating efforts in this field.” Now, if Russia reasserts itself as the dominant power in Eastern Europe, this pretty much check-mates the empire’s global ambitions, so containing Russia and limiting its influence in Europe is absolutely critical and I think they will not give up on this even at the price of a nuclear war.

Question: Russia has put forward security proposals to the U.S. and NATO calling for a written guarantee of no further eastward expansion of the bloc to include membership of Ukraine and other neighboring countries. Moscow also wants guarantees of no American strike weapons to be installed in neighboring territories. Critics of Russia say these demands are an unreasonable ultimatum from Moscow that impinges on nations’ freedom of choice to determine their security options. How do you see it?

Alex Krainer: I think that much of the West is torn between cooperation and trade with Russia and the policy of Cold War and confrontation. As British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has recently put it addressing “our friends” in Europe, “a choice is shortly coming between mainlining ever more Russian hydrocarbons in giant new pipelines and sticking up for Ukraine” and championing the cause of peace and stability. He literally put it in those terms and I think his words do reflect the continent’s dilemma. For the ordinary people and most businesses, the choice is between having a strong export market for their products and abundant energy keeping their homes warm and their societies running and an acute energy crisis and the risk of a hot war with a nuclear power. For the empire builders it is equally clear: no matter how delusional, they will never give up on their ambition to rule the world. As late John Kenneth Galbraith noted, “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage”.

I think that the Russian leadership has no illusions about the nature of their conflict with the West, but in putting forward their tough security proposals they have chosen the moment of fractious politics across much of the West to force a showdown between the forces representing legitimate democratic concerns in the Western societies and those representing the interest of the empire builders. Today those proposals may seem unreasonable to some, but this is only because we all got accustomed to the idea that Western powers somehow have the right to do as they well please while other powers have no right to object or assert their own security concerns.

Question: Do you think Russia can be faulted for not being more proactive in past years on objecting to NATO expansion? Moscow maintains it was given verbal guarantees in the late 1990s by U.S. leaders that there would be no eastward expansion of the military bloc. Yet as we know, NATO membership was given to former Warsaw Pact nations Poland and Hungary in 1999, then to the Baltic states in 2004, and in 2008 an offer made to the former Soviet Republics of Ukraine and Georgia. Therefore, has Russia been complacent in passively allowing the present security crisis to evolve in Europe? In other words, does the appeasement argument actually run in reverse, namely that Russia has been at fault for appeasing the United States and NATO?

Alex Krainer: After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia very nearly disintegrated. Its economy collapsed and experienced the longest depression recorded anywhere during the 20th century. It was in a very weak position and Western powers took advantage of that weakness to expand NATO eastward to secure that imperative of dominating Eastern Europe and through it the Eurasian landmass. It is true that Russia suffered this breach of faith rather passively, but Russian leadership probably judged that they were not in the position to credibly counter the West, that they were too vulnerable to Western sanctions and that they needed to rebuild their economic, political, diplomatic and military muscle. I think you have a point in saying that the appeasement argument might run in reverse, but in this case, I believe Russia’s strategy has been to play a long game and wait to confront the West from a position of strength. Twenty years ago, Russia was broken while today it is a force to reckon with. We’ll see how things play out, but one thing is certain – the empire builders now have a worthy adversary.

Question: Do you see a diplomatic solution to the crisis?

Alex Krainer: A diplomatic solution will have to be found – this is inevitable. Even if we see a hot war break out between Russia and the U.S. and NATO, such a conflict would not last forever and in the end the adversaries would still have to sit at a table and sign some sort of a treaty. Of course, for 99.99% of all involved, a diplomatic solution now would be preferable to one following a nuclear Armageddon. I tend to be more optimistic and hope that we won’t see a war break out, but I’ve already lived through the breakout of war and I know firsthand that the unthinkable can actually happen so we shouldn’t be complacent either. To the extent that the legitimate institutions and mechanisms of democracy still function in the West, we ought to use them to put pressure on our policymakers to defend peace. I would certainly prefer to see Russian hydrocarbons in giant new pipelines rather than another tragic European war fought ultimately for someone’s delusional agenda of world domination.

Endnote: By way of demonstrating the reality of which nation is most responsible for war and destruction since the end of World War II, Alex Krainer cited the following study and comment. The astounding disconnect with public perception says a lot about the propaganda function of Western media:

He writes: In June of 2014, a group of American researchers published an article in the American Journal of Public Health, pointing out that, “Since the end of World War II, there have been 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations around the world. The United States launched 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and 2001, and since then, others, including Afghanistan and Iraq.” To be sure, each of these wars was duly explained and justified to the American public and for all those Americans who believe that their government would never deceive them, each war was defensible and fought for a good reason. Nonetheless, the fact that one nation initiated more than 80% of all wars in the last seventy years does require an explanation.”

Over the past year, the massive upheaval in the United States from workers going on industrial strike and walking off jobs signifies an increasing awareness of class politics. In the following interview, Harriet Fraad says that American workers are overcoming decades of suppression from anti-communist propaganda as well as a betrayal by the two main political parties.

Workers are becoming aware of their rights and their conditions of exploitation under the corporate capitalist system. They are angry and restless for an alternative economic system. For the first time in a long time the words “capitalism” and “socialism” are now entering conscious public discussions. Workers, says Fraad, are well aware of their betrayal by the Democratic Party which has sold out their class cause for the benefit of the party’s leadership from corporate sponsorship.

More than ever, she contends, the working majority of the United States needs the representation and leadership of a new political party that galvanizes their needs and rights under a socialist program.

Historically, Fraad points out, the United States always had a strong movement of working-class politics and socialist parties, for example at the end of the 19th century and during the early 20th century. Unfortunately, much of that tradition was destroyed by the pro-capitalist establishment using Red Scare tactics during the Cold War, including the Democratic Party, the corporate media and official trade union bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, the recent acute exploitation of workers during the pandemic period and the grotesque growth in wealth inequality are forcing American workers to question the entire system and to realize their collective political power as a working-class constituency that comprises the vast majority of the 330 million U.S. population.

However, as Harriet Fraad warns, the potential for progressive change in the United States could still be hijacked and destroyed by the rise of right-wing populism under demagogues like Donald Trump. The Republican rightwing and the ineffectual Democratic Party under President Joe Biden are creating the base for fascism which may vanquish the potential for progressive socialism. Thus, America is coming to face an ominous crossroads, in her view, which boils down to this: will the United States embrace socialism or will it descend into fascism?

Dr Harriet Fraad lives in New York City. She has been a practicing psychotherapist and hypnotherapist for nearly four decades. She is also a political activist, a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in the United States during the late 1960s and co-founder of the journal Rethinking Marxism. Fraad is co-author of several books, including Class Struggle on the Home Front and Imagine Living in a Socialist USA. She broadcasts a weekly commentary Capitalism Hits Home covering current labor and economic issues as part of the Democracy at Work channel. Fraad is particularly critical of how the Democratic Party in the United States has elevated so-called “identity politics” over the more central issue of class politics, the fight for workers’ rights and the advancement of socialism. That subject of how the CIA and the Democratic Party played the U.S. population into the trivial pursuit of identity politics will be returned to in a future interview for Strategic Culture Foundation.

Interview

Question: Despite a lack of mainstream media coverage, nevertheless there is an unmistakable impression that the United States is undergoing widespread labor strikes and resignations over the past year. Can you give us some figures on this development in worker protests? How significant are these demonstrations in the historical perspective of the American economy, industrial relations and society?

Harriet Fraad: There are over 100,000 people currently on strike in the U.S. At least four million have dropped out of the labor force. There have been over 1,000 separate industrial actions during the past year. These are low estimates. With the exception of Mike Elk’s Payday Report, strikes and labor actions are routinely under-reported by our corporate media. As reported elsewhere, billions of dollars in profits were made by U.S. corporations during the pandemic and the recession that accompanied it. Billionaire wealth surged by 70 percent, or $2.1 trillion, during the same period that saw massive impoverishment of workers and their families; U.S. billionaires are now worth a combined $5 trillion. Meanwhile, wages were not raised.

Question: Do the mass labor strikes across the United States signal an increase in workers becoming more aware of issues of class politics and an increase in militancy to demand their rights as workers?

Harriet Fraad: The class awareness of U.S. workers is, at least up to now, not a conscious class awareness. It is not informed by a socialist media presence, any socialist daily newspapers, television stations, or socialist internet. Historically, class awareness was effectively crushed by a national anti-communist crusade with the public trials of hundreds of people suspected of belonging to the Communist Party or what they considered its fellow travelers in the Socialist Party and the left. The confederation of trade unions, the AFL-CIO, expelled the activist left and its communist and socialist organizers. They were the militants that kept the unions vital. Without them, the union movement lost its wider purpose of worker power. In the 1950s, 35 percent of U.S. workers were organized in unions. Now there is barely 10 percent in unions.

However, class consciousness was re-introduced with the Occupy Movement of 2011. There, the idea of the 1 percent super-wealthy and the 99 percent of the rest of society took root in popular perception. It is significant that former President Barack Obama, a supposed “progressive” Democrat, crushed Occupy sites across the nation in 2012. Having said that, class consciousness across the U.S. is just beginning to be revived.

Question: Can it be discerned that America’s workers and their families – who represent a majority of the 330 million population – are becoming: a) more critical of capitalism as an economic system; and b) more receptive to and supportive of an alternative socialist politics?

Harriet Fraad: For the first time since the 1950s, capitalism can be named as a system rather than the implicitly assumed only system for organizing an economy. U.S. grotesque inequality is exposed and becoming increasingly conscious among workers, especially for the young whose future is dire. Young Americans are mired in student debt, deprived of jobs with a future, and may even lose their planet due to capitalism.

Question: Traditionally, in the two-party U.S. political system the Democrats are viewed as being pro-labor and pro-union, but it seems that over recent decades the Democrats have become indistinguishable from the Republican Party as being loyal and pliable servants of Big Business. Can you explain this trend with historical reference?

Harriet Fraad: The big sell-out of the Democratic Party to corporate interests was launched by Bill Clinton in 1993. He had been elected with union energy and union financial support. Yet, he was most instrumental in making the Democratic Party a party serving corporate capitalist interests and taking corporate money.

When Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), he allowed jobs in the United States to be outsourced to Mexico and he gave his blessing to the exodus of millions of U.S. jobs to nations with low wages, terrible working conditions and weak or no ecological protections.

Clinton initiated the Democratic Party’s new corporate strategy of verbally celebrating racial, gender and sexual equality and justice while advancing corporate interests and abandoning the poor and the white working-class. In just one instance, he killed cash assistance for needy families and ripped a huge hole in the American social welfare safety net. He threw millions of poor black and white women and children into bad jobs and terrible poverty while claiming “progressive” treatment for all.

Question: Does this historical background partly explain the phenomenal rise of Donald Trump as a “populist hero”?

Harriet Fraad: Yes. The neglected white working-class gave up on the Democrats that sold them out and they were ripe for Trump’s empty promise to “Make America Great Again”. They were outraged by their perception that the gains made by people of color and women were what took their jobs away. That was a misperception distorted and presented to them by Trump. People of color and women still earn less than white men. It was not people of color and women but rather corporate profiteering that took their better-paid manufacturing jobs to nations like Mexico, China and India with terrible job conditions. It was corporate capitalists like Trump and their servants like Clinton who took their jobs. Trump exploits white working-class rage. In the absence of a powerful present socialist analysis, Trump alone speaks to their outrage. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, had a chance to win as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. Sanders was defeated. He was outvoted by traditional African-Americans who chose Hilary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Sanders’s defeat was aided and abetted by the Democratic Party leadership.

Question: If the modern Democratic Party is a hindrance to the cause of workers, shouldn’t workers then seek to establish a new third party that actually fights for their class interests?

U.S. workers are now beginning to reclaim class consciousness.

America direly needs a unified socialist voice that connects the various movements like Black Lives Matter, Climate Extinction, the Feminist Movement, MeToo# and Timesup#, Labor rights, transsexual rights, socialist and communist parties and the movement to transform capitalist business and all other forms of organizations into cooperatives. They need a movement and a party that is against all arbitrary divisions between people. The movement and party should be an umbrella organization. The handle and stem represent class justice. The spokes and their multicolored fabric are all of the movements that are needed to create class, race, gender, and sexual justice for all.

Question: The corporate news media and academia suggest that somehow socialism is antithetical to ordinary Americans. Is a mass movement for socialism possible in the United States? What would that take for it to mobilize and achieve governance?

Harriet Fraad: A mass socialist movement is certainly possible in the United States. In fact, there has been a long history of socialism in America from cooperative communal movements to official socialist and communist parties.

The Socialist Party was a powerful force in the U.S. from the turn of the century until the First World War. Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate won a million votes even though he ran from prison in 1920. Socialism and communism are not antithetical to Americans. However, when they actually threatened capitalism as mass movements they were severely repressed by the federal government in the service of corporate capitalism.

Question: The social discontent and political disorientation in the United States seems to have reached unstable levels. If a viable democratic socialist direction is not harnessed by the people, do you fear that a reactionary alternative is a real danger? That is, for fascist politics to fully emerge from the incipient forms we see already in an increasingly rightwing Republican Party?

Harriet Fraad: The U.S. empire, like the USSR, is imploding out of its own corruption. America is polarized. There is far greater acceptance of a socialist alternative to capitalism as well as the danger of a well-financed turn towards fascism. On the socialist side, labor, a mass base, is awakening to the outrage of super-exploitation by the 1 percent. People are politically active on the left as they have not been since the 1960 and 1970s. A majority of young people prefer socialism to capitalism. However, the U.S. left does not have a centrally organized national organization around which to unite. If it did, it could mobilize the majority of Americans.

The Trumpian right in the Republican Party has no positive program except for gun rights and police and military support. Instead, they rage at Democrats, progressives, people of color, immigrants and abortion rights. They have a strong presence in our capitalist media. They are well-funded and have a populist and visible leader.

Germany became fascist because when its capitalism failed and wild inflation wiped out the livelihoods of the mass of workers, although Germany had a powerful Communist Party at the time, the German corporate wealth supported fascism as an alternative to socialism.

The spontaneous labor uprisings in the U.S. are promising. But we do not know how it will turn out in the United States.

United States President Joe Biden held his first direct dialogue with China’s President Xi Jinping amid spiraling tensions between the world’s two biggest economies. Professor Francis Boyle gives his take on the “big event” in a brief interview below.

First though, some background. It seems oddly complacent that it has taken nearly 10 months since Biden entered the White House for these leaders to finally get around to engaging in substantive talks given the urgent context of fraught relations.

Some observers will see the conference held online on November 15 as a welcome move to put the brakes on a dangerous dynamic that is potentially leading towards military confrontation. But a closer look beneath the optics of the meeting reveal that there was no removal of the fundamental source of tensions, which is US hegemonic ambitions, according to Boyle.

The online summit was initiated by Biden and lasted for more than three hours. The American side gave the event high-profile TV coverage. Chinese media tended to welcome the meeting as signaling a possible turning point for improved relations. However, while both leaders appeared to be cordial there was little sign that Washington has changed its fundamental position of antagonizing China, a policy that is leading to armed conflict in particular over Taiwan.

Professor Francis A. Boyle comments in the following interview that both sides remain entrenched in opposing positions. He notes that President Xi warned the Americans that China would not tolerate any interference promoting Taiwan’s independence. For his part, Biden said the US maintains its so-called One China Policy recognizing Beijing’s sovereignty over Taiwan. But at the same time, Washington retains “strategic ambiguity” which gives itself license to supply Taiwan with military weapons, a policy that is emboldening Taiwanese declared independence from the mainland.

From the White House readout of Biden’s comments, the US side also arrogates a presumptive right to lecture China over alleged human rights abuses. Objectively speaking, this US position is cynical and provocative given its blatant hypocrisy over its own record of gross human rights abuses, past and present, as Boyle has extensively documented in his scholarly and legal work over several decades. For Biden to keep pushing this arrogant charade as with previous administrations is proof that Washington is not capable of conducting relations based on mutual respect, which Xi called for.

Boyle points out that the disastrous retreat by the US from its failed war in Afghanistan is largely motivated by Washington’s geopolitical need to confront what it views as the primary challenge to its global power stemming from an ascendant China and an emerging multipolar world. Afghanistan does not represent “an end to American wars”, as Biden claimed. It is more a conservation and redirection of imperial power. In that regard, the online summit with Xi initiated by Biden is merely more deception and duplicity by the US side, which does little to mitigate dangerous tensions.

Francis Anthony Boyle is Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He is an alumni cum laude of Harvard School of Law. Boyle has served as counsel for Bosnia-Herzegovina and an advisor to the Palestinian Authority. He is a long-standing critic of US policy supporting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories which he has condemned as genocide. Boyle has denounced US governments over foreign policy that systematically promotes war and the oppression of indigenous peoples. He is author of numerous books, including The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence; Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three-Decade US Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution; World Politics and International Law; Destroying World Order: US Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11; and Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations.

Interview

Question: After the online summit this week between US President Joe Biden and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, do you see any grounds for optimism for US-China relations improving and “veering away from conflict” as President Biden put it?

Francis Boyle: No. President Xi read the riot act to Biden on Taiwan. So far, I have seen no evidence that Biden is backing down on his support for the Taiwan independence movement.

Question: Was it significant that the summit was requested by Biden in the first place?

Francis Boyle: Yes. This was basically a public relations gesture by Biden to convince the American people and the world that he was really doing something to calm the situation down when in fact on the ground in Taiwan and in the seas of the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea he is doing the exact opposite. I am sure President Xi is paying attention to what Biden is doing, not what he is talking about in a virtual summit that Biden broadcasted in the media for propaganda purposes. As Machiavelli said in The Prince, the Prince must learn to be a fine liar and hypocrite. That’s Joe Biden!

Question: Biden told Xi that the US still supports the One China Policy. Do you see this statement lowering tensions over Taiwan?

Francis Boyle: Of course not. Indeed, right after the meeting the Biden administration announced there is going to be a high-level meeting between US defense experts and Taiwan defense experts. Biden basically slapped Xi in the face right after their “summit”.

Question: Biden mentioned various human rights concerns in China. Xi did not mention human rights concerns in the US Does that indicate US policy is still hampered by arrogance and presumption of superiority?

Francis Boyle: Of course. Like all US administrations going back to Jimmy Carter, they have all used “human rights” as a propaganda weapon against their designated adversaries. Meanwhile, look at what successive recent US governments have done to the Palestinians, or the Libyans, or the Iraqis, or the Syrians, or the Somalis, or the Yemenis, or the Afghans, etc. Massive death and destruction all over the Middle East and Central Asia.

Question: China’s President Xi often talks about how China is no longer the weak giant of former times when the US and European imperial powers dominated it as for example during the 19th Century Opium Wars. Would you agree that there is a new historic reality of US imperial decline in a multipolar world where China is more than capable of determining relations?

Francis Boyle: Yes. The United States government just suffered the most catastrophic defeat since Vietnam in Afghanistan. They have learned nothing from it. Indeed, Biden said that they are leaving Afghanistan in order to better confront China. QED.

Washington’s real objective is to criminalize critical journalism and indeed any form of critical dissent.

In an audacious attack on free speech, journalists and writers based in the United States have now been banned by the U.S. federal authorities from publishing articles with Strategic Culture Foundation. We interview one of those authors affected by the ban, New York City-based journalist Daniel Lazare who shares his thoughts on the profound implications for free speech, independent journalism and political dissent.

Lazare is one of several U.S.-based writers who formerly published regular columns with Strategic Culture Foundation. Our online journal greatly appreciated their intelligent insights and analysis of U.S. and international politics. Sadly, we will no longer be able to publish their columns because of the threat levied on them by the U.S. federal authorities who accuse SCF of being an influence operation directed by the Kremlin. The allegations and threats are baseless and draconian.

If U.S.-based writers defy the ban, they have been threatened with astronomical financial penalties of over $300,000. The prohibition has only emerged in recent weeks. It follows earlier moves by the U.S. State Department and the Treasury Department accusing SCF of being an agent of Russian foreign intelligence. No evidence has been presented by the U.S. authorities to support their provocative claims. The Editorial Board of SCF categorically dismisses the allegations. In a statement, the editors said: “We reject all such claims by the U.S. authorities that the journal is an alleged Russian intelligence operation. We have no connection with the Russian government. We provide an independent forum for international writers to debate and freely critique major topical issues of world importance.”

Strategic Culture Foundation’s editorial production is based in Russia and the journal has been publishing articles by international authors for over a decade. The online journal has gained respect and readership primarily in North America for its critical and diverse coverage of geopolitics. It seems that the official move to ban SCF by the U.S. government is really aimed at shutting down independent journalism and critical thinking under the cynical guise of combating a “foreign enemy”. This has baleful echoes with the Red Scare Cold War years in the U.S.

By banning American voices from the journal, Washington is attempting to bolster its smear against SCF as being a sinister intelligence agency. But the real objective is to criminalize critical journalism and indeed any form of critical dissent. Arguably, the draconian attack by the U.S. authorities has to be seen in the wider context of persecuting Julian Assange and other whistleblowers who have exposed Washington’s crimes and corruption.

Daniel Lazare is a veteran newspaper journalist who specializes in U.S. constitutional law and rights. He formerly worked for Consortium News and Strategic Culture Foundation among other outlets. The New York City-based writer now publishes a regular column for The Weekly Worker, the paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Interview

Question: You mentioned that you were approached by members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation concerning article contributions as a columnist for Strategic Culture Foundation. Can you expand on those circumstances? When were you first approached, how recently, and did they specify SCF and the reasons for why the journal was being targeted?

Daniel Lazare: A couple of FBI agents knocked on my door on a blazing hot day in July 2020. My memory is fuzzy, but I distinctly remember them asking whether I could tell them about SCF and its alleged links with Russian intelligence. I replied that I wasn’t interested because I regard the entire avenue of inquiry as bogus and a product of the anti-Moscow hysteria that’s running rampant in Washington. So the agents left. Everything was polite and low-keyed, and the entire exchange took no more than four or five minutes.

Question: Other U.S.-based writers who have had articles published by SCF also say they were warned by the FBI to halt writing. They say they were warned that such activity could incur massive financial penalties. Was such a penalty cited to you?

Daniel Lazare: Yes it was. Early in November this year, that is 15 or 16 months after the initial visit, one of the FBI agents showed up at my door again with a letter from the U.S. Treasury dated October 15, 2021, warning that, “pursuant to Executive Order 13848 of September 12, 2018, … all property and interests in property of SCF that are subject to U.S. jurisdiction are blocked, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them.” The letter further advised that “each violation… is subject to a statutory maximum civil monetary penalty of up to the greater of $311,562 or twice the value of the underlying transaction.” I’m not even sure what “up to the greater” means. But I got the message that my savings could be wiped out if I didn’t desist.

Question: The U.S. State Department and Treasury have sanctioned SCF on the basis of allegations that the journal is an instrument of Russian foreign intelligence and the Russian foreign ministry. The SCF editorial board rejects those allegations. What do you make of the U.S. accusations? Are they credible?

Daniel Lazare: No, they are not credible. Anyone who takes one look at the SCF website will see that it features articles on foreign policy and world affairs that, politically speaking, cover the map from conservative to Marxist. To be sure, most of the articles published are critical of U.S. policy, but that’s the only consistent thread. So I can’t see how this benefits the Kremlin in any significant way since such viewpoints are common throughout the internet. Everyone knows that the United States is a global bully, so why bother adding to the chorus? Of course, if the U.S. authorities provided something by way of tangible evidence of an intelligence link, things might be different. But since they haven’t, we are left with nothing more than an assertion that is dubious on its face.

Question: Presumably, the U.S. authorities will not pursue legal and financial action against U.S.-based authors who desist from further writing work for SCF. That is, there will be no retrospective litigation for past work. That suggests the move is an expedient and unscrupulous one aimed at intimidating writers. How do you see it?

Daniel Lazare: I see it that way too. As part of its sanctions campaign, Washington is not only trying to impose an economic blockade on Russian companies but a journalistic blockade as well. And it thinks nothing of trampling on Americans’ First Amendment rights in doing so.

Question: Do you think perhaps that the U.S. authorities are exploiting hysteria over alleged Russian interference and influence as a pretext to close down critical independent speech? It seems the “Russiagate” narrative that began as a way to undermine the Trump presidency in 2016 is alive and well.

Daniel Lazare: The implications in terms of free speech and critical thinking are profound. By forcing journalists to line up behind U.S. foreign policy in this way, the Washington federal government is telling them that dissent has its limits. Intelligence and analysis are fine as long as they don’t deviate from the official line. This was certainly the case during Russiagate when journalists who dared question the “collusion” thesis found themselves effectively sidelined. And it’s still true even though Russiagate is supposedly behind us. The bottom line is that critical thinking will hurt your career, so don’t indulge yourself too much if you want to get ahead.

Question: In your long experience of working as a newspaper journalist, have you seen anything like this effort by the U.S. government to censor? Historically, how does it compare with the McCarthyite Cold War era of persecuting alleged fifth columnists for the Soviet Union?

Daniel Lazare: Unfortunately, the campaign against SCF is far from unprecedented. Since the days of anti-communist Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, the government has worked overtime at narrowing the bounds of acceptable discourse. Free speech has never been verboten as a whole. Indeed, it was perfectly OK – even voguish in certain quarters – to argue that “Tailgunner Joe”, a nickname by which McCarthy was mocked, was going too far, that he was running roughshod over civil liberties, etc. As long as you were careful to stress that communism was still a threat, you were fine. But arguing that the McCarthyite Red threat was overdone while also arguing that communists might actually be right about certain things, such as the poisonous levels of racism in the U.S. South, that was completely off-limits. Journalists had to engage in careful self-censorship so as to preclude any suggestion of fundamental ideological disagreement. The effort is alive and well during the age of neo-McCarthyism known as Russiagate.

Question: In the sinister age of persecution of whistleblowers like Julian Assange by the U.S. authorities, it seems that independent journalism is being criminalized. Do you see a connection between the Assange case and what the U.S. government is doing with regard to prohibiting U.S.-based journalists from working for Strategic Culture Foundation?

Daniel Lazare: I do see a connection in that the aim in both cases is clearly to narrow the bounds of acceptable discourse. On one hand, the U.S. government wants us to swallow the absurd lie that Assange is guilty of espionage merely because he has received inside government information, something that investigative journalists do seven days a week. On the other, it wants journalists to agree not to write for a website on the grounds that it’s an arm of Russian intelligence even though the government has provided nothing by way of evidence. It’s impossible to do either without tossing critical faculties by the wayside. But that’s exactly what the U.S. government wants us to do – so as to eliminate political dissent.

Sometimes things get so bad that one party feels it is best just to walk away from the relationship. That reasoning, notes Professor Paul Robinson in the following interview, seems to be behind Russia’s recent decision to cut diplomatic links with the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Russia has similarly rebuffed relations with the European Union, lamenting that they also have broken down and become dysfunctional. These moves do not signify a sinister Russian agenda, according to Robinson. It simply reflects a frustration with and disillusionment in diplomatic channels that Moscow has pursued over several decades with both blocs. Henceforth, it may be more productive for Moscow to deal with individual states on a bilateral basis rather than through mediation with collective groups. This is because, as Robinson explains, both NATO and the EU have become encumbered with “groupthink” and “group polarization” whereby the blocs have adopted extremely prejudicial attitudes towards Russia. Paradoxically, the group position tends to be not representative of all individual members. He cautions, however, that tensions between East and West may persist and even escalate.

Paul Robinson’s biography includes currently being Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa where he teaches Russian and military history, among other topics. He writes extensively for international media on relations between Russia and the West. Prior to graduate studies at Toronto and Oxford Universities, he served as a regular officer in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 1989 to 1994, and as a reserve officer in the Canadian Forces from 1994 to 1996. He also worked as a media research executive in Moscow in 1995. Robinson is the author of six books, including Russian Conservatism: An Ideology or a Natural Attitude?

Interview

Question: You recently described the now suspended NATO-Russia Council as something of a “charade” – where little was achieved in terms of meaningful communication between NATO and Russia. Why was this forum so ineffective? Moscow claims its views were not being listened to. Is that a reasonable grievance?

Paul Robinson: I think that there were perhaps clashing expectations on both sides as to what such an arrangement was for and what it could achieve, which led both of them to feel frustrated with the results. Ultimately, the problem is that they have different perceptions of their interests. As the more powerful party, NATO feels no need to concede. Nor does it feel under any moral or political obligation to do so. Russia, on the other hand, is not the Russia of the 1990s, when NATO-Russia cooperation began. It is stronger, more confident, more self-assertive. It too is not in a mood to concede. The result is an ever-growing confrontation.

Question: Russia appears to be now moving toward trying to set up bilateral communications with individual members of NATO. You have mentioned the problem of “groupthink” and “group polarization”. Can you elaborate on how those dynamics operate and how they limited NATO dialogue with Russia?

Paul Robinson: Groupthink tends to suppress dissent, as dissenters don’t want to cause trouble or stand out from the crowd. The prevailing narrative or dominant position therefore tends to go unchallenged. And, of course, the more it goes unchallenged, the more it becomes accepted as gospel truth and the harder it is to counter it. At present, the dominant narrative in the West is the malign nature of the “Putin regime” and of Russian foreign and defense policy. Groupthink means that even if somebody within NATO disagreed with this, they would be unlikely to challenge it.

Group polarization works slightly differently. It is a process whereby discussion pushes members of a group towards extremes, normally towards an extreme version of the dominant position at the start. Within the EU and NATO, this process has become more pronounced, I think, since the inclusion of eastern European states, some of whom, particularly Poland and the Baltic States, are very hostile towards Russia. Their presence within the EU and NATO has pushed those organizations towards a more extreme version of anti-Russianism than would otherwise have been the case. Both institutions work on consensus, and to reach consensus they concede to the most Russophobic elements.

Question: There appears to be an analogy with how Russia’s diplomatic dealings with NATO have also been manifest with regard to Russia’s relations with the European Union as a bloc. Would you agree that there is something of the same kind of dynamics at play frustrating meaningful dialogue?

Paul Robinson: The EU and NATO have similar membership but are constructed in different ways. EU decision-making is very complex, and it requires the agreement of almost all involved. As a result, it can be very difficult for the EU to come to any sort of decision, let alone come to it quickly. This can make dealing with the EU very frustrating for outside parties, who therefore prefer to deal with individual members. In addition to that, the EU, like NATO, has to take into account the deeply anti-Russian stances of some of its members, and as such will always be more anti-Russia than will much of the EU’s membership. This provides another incentive for Russia to skirt EU institutions whenever possible and deal with members one on one.

Question: No doubt Russia will now be accused more than ever of trying to split Western alliances by going down the route of opting for bilateral negotiations with individual nations. How do you ascertain Russia’s motives? Is it genuine reaching out, or something more Machiavellian?

Paul Robinson: I don’t see anything Machiavellian in what Russia is doing. While some will accuse it of trying to split NATO and the EU, in reality it’s just pursuing its national interests, and it finds it easier to do so bilaterally than by working with NATO and/or the EU. That’s really all there is to it.

Question: You have expressed doubt about Moscow’s political prudence in closing down the NATO diplomatic links, suggesting that the move leaves Russia open to criticism of being non-communicative and worsening already fraught relations with the West. However, do you not think it is better to clear the air, so to speak, and disabuse any illusions of “partnership”?

Paul Robinson: There are perhaps times when things get so bad that the only thing left to do is walk away. Clearly, Moscow has decided that that time is now. I think that the step is more symbolic than anything else, as the diplomatic links were not achieving anything positive in practice. If relations improve, the links can be quite easily restored. I think, though, that that is very unlikely for a very long time, if ever. The rift seems pretty permanent and I am not optimistic for a reduction of East-West tensions.

Question: At the latest NATO summit of defense ministers held last week there were the familiar accusations of Russia threatening Europe’s security and that of Ukraine in particular. Moscow, on the other hand, points to NATO expansion over many years in contravention of the NATO-Russia Founding Act in 1997, as well as more recently supplying Ukraine with billions of dollars worth of lethal weaponry. Which narrative is more credible: Russia as aggressor, or NATO as aggressor?

Paul Robinson: I consider the situation to be a classic example of what international scholars call the “security dilemma”. Mutual suspicions lead each side to take measures to defend themselves against the other; those measures are then seen as threatening by the other party, sparking further measures, which are in turn seen as threatening, thus inducing yet more measures, and so on, in a process of escalation. So, Russian actions to protect itself induce fear in NATO, which takes action to protect itself, which induces fear in Moscow, which takes measures, etc, etc. Once you’re on this spiral, it’s hard to get off.

Question: U.S. President Joe Biden talks about not wanting a Cold War with China or Russia. But U.S. conduct and policy contradicts this seeming aspiration of not wanting confrontation. What is going on with U.S. policy? Is it deception, duplicity or plain incoherence with nobody in control?

Paul Robinson: I don’t believe that this is duplicity. I do think that policy is poorly thought through, and the likely reactions of China and Russia to U.S. policy are not properly considered. This may be in part because policy is rarely coherent in the sense of being the product of a single will, resulting in a single, clear objective with actions being coordinated carefully with that objective. Multiple, often competing interest groups contribute to policy-making. Economic interests dictate good relations with China. But the military-industrial complex profits from depicting China as a dangerous threat. And so on. The result is some sort of compromise in which the state seeks both to have good relations with China and to “contain”/“deter” China in a way that of course threatens it and may contribute to worsening relations. The fact that the various elements of policy don’t fit each other well is simply a product of how policy is made in a large, complex state such as the USA.

Question: What steps need to be taken by the United States, Russia and China in order to alleviate tensions and improve global security?

Paul Robinson: Those involved need a little less self-assurance and a little more understanding of the other side’s perspective. Military expenditures need to be cut – war between the large powers is unthinkable, given the destruction it would cause, so in my opinion there is no justification for most of the military capacity currently deployed and being developed. The reality is that the richest parts of the world live in considerable security. This is especially true of countries in the West: we have no need for military capabilities. By reducing them we would send positive signals to other parties that could help cut through the Gordian knot of the security dilemma and help to de-escalate international tensions.