Can Trump End the Ukraine War? w/ Scott Horton
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Well, we're going to have a fun conversation today because we have a returning guest, someone we always like to have on for foreign policy analysis. He's our good friend, editor of antiwar.com and the Libertarian Institute.

Scott Horton, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. Good to be back with you. It's great having you on. Now, you have a book out, which is, I see it on your left, it's called Provoked, which is the new book that you've got documenting the history of our relationship to Ukraine, is that correct, and Russia? Or where do you start the time story here? Are we doing it like Putin-style back to...

The 1400s or 800 AD? You might think so by the volume of the thing. But no, I basically go back to H.W. Bush and the end of the last Cold War.

And, um, I should get used to saying this upfront instead of later that I don't care about Russia. None of this is Russian talking points. I'll speak Russian or read Russian or watch Russian news channels all day or any of this stuff. And I'm not a Russian partisan. And in fact, it's kind of funny because back in the old commie days, there were some Americans who were communists who favored the Soviet union because of their communism. But, um,

I don't think there really is a pro-Russian faction anywhere in America now, even among Russian expats. Right? You don't see like pro-Putinists, any things. Like it's just, it doesn't exist. Because why? What does he have to offer? He's just a center-right Republican. Right. But we already have those. Like what is there to venerate about him? Nothing. And certainly nothing that a Texan cares about. So, no.

There's my disclaimer. It seems like there's a lot of people in Russia, especially that think he's very milquetoast and moderate in his dealings with the West, you know, even during this war, you know, and there's a lot of people who are way to his right in the internal politics of power in Russia. He's got a problem. I mean, what are you going to do if you're him? Same as if you're the Ayatollah. Like if you're not just you in his position, but if you're that guy.

What are you going to do with a problem like the USA? You can try your best to go along, try your best to deal with it, try your best to not get bombed and keep them from overthrowing you. They're not in the position of strength versus America overall. In eastern Ukraine, it's a different story. But essentially what happened is, as everybody knows, the Soviet Union disappeared and then there was one.

USA, the global superpower, right? And sometimes they would say the policemen of the world on the right. That's a better phrase. The left is more apt to use empire, which is a pretty apt description of what it is. There are a million euphemisms for it. Predominance and preeminence and hegemony and full spectrum dominance and

And what it means is the middle part of North America is the boss of everybody forever. No matter whether the people of Florida can afford it or not, no matter whether the people of the USA can afford it or not, everyone will do whatever we say. And as the law enforcer, of course, we get to break the law and do whatever we want and accuse everybody else of being the criminals. And that's been the world order.

That really was the new world order. What did that really mean? People say, well, it meant one world government. And there were some kooks who did want to really build a one world government, especially after World War II. But by the time H.W. Bush said it, he was really just announcing the era of American predominance. And in fact, that's a brand new article out in Foreign Affairs today by the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, majority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell.

And it says we must not retreat to isolationism. We must maintain predominance, he says. That's, you know, probably the term most commonly associated with

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, a Polish aristocrat and basically a right-wing Cold War Democrat and a leading light in the foreign policy community ever since then until he died just a few years ago. He was basically the Democrats' version of Henry Kissinger. And there's a little difference. There's a little sunlight between the Zbigniew Brzezinski model and the neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, right? Yeah.

Yes, there is. I guess you could say the realists in the more Council on Foreign Relations type care about the American national interests at all and are more interested in European affairs.

The neocons are really just Israel firsters, although the Wolfowitz doctrine and, you know, he and Libyan Khalilzad had written the defense planning guidance in 92 that said America must be the dominant military force in every region of the world. No power or even regional combination of powers should even be able to entertain the idea of being able to challenge our military power.

They will know that we will hit them first. So they shouldn't even bother trying to build up against us. And so that's been the doctrine. And of course, the thing is, is it's all,

built on a lot of self-righteousness and a lot of money making, but focus on the self-righteousness here. And everybody knows that we're the good guys. And what you prefer, the Germans or the Japanese or the Russians or the Chinese that they dominate the whole world. Well, if it wasn't us, it'd be them instead. And the whole world would be at war all the time. And so we have to hold it all down. We have to hold the world together because if we don't, it's a messianic complex. It is. And the thing is,

There are plenty of anecdotes of other nations being bad actors and the Americans telling them to knock it off, and it works. So they have plenty of kind of positive reinforcement in their conception of themselves as the world's saviors.

And then, yeah, OK, there's some conflicts of interest built in when we have a pipeline go this way instead of that way. And some certain companies make money on that instead of some others. And there's a conflict of interest when these companies are making money selling weapons and these countries are being contracted to provide or these companies are being contracted to provide intelligence analysis services.

services or whatever it is, it's all built into the thing that they're all taking advantage. Think of it like this. Imagine America having a movement to spread democracy around the world and to do everything they can to make sure that every country has regular elections and an independent judiciary and all this stuff, but they don't care at all who wins.

And they don't it's never even crossed their mind whether it's the pro-American side that wins the election or the other guys. No, of course not. Of course, the whole thing is based on expanding American power and influence, or at least it's intertwined with it the whole way. Or certainly if you were on the receiving end, you would see the whole thing as just a cynical exercise of.

in empire building you know they dress it up their their pr american you know public relations masters so they call it the rules-based liberal international order but what does that mean that means that we don't have to obey the law we can do whatever we want because we're the law like boss hog right like i'm the law around here boy and you have to do what i say that's what it is so is this passionate

A dispassionate analysis of America's foreign policy would be that of, if it is a cop, a crooked cop with high ideals. That's right. A visionary, idealistic, crooked cop. There you go. And it's, look, H.W. Bush is a great example, right? H.W. Bush, he said two things. He said, the world trusts us with this power because they know that we can be trusted with it because we are the good guys and we only mean well.

He also said, what we say goes. So you're either the hero on the playground or you're the bully on the playground, and sometimes the other kids can't tell which. This might be one way to put it. You know what I mean? But Trump is continuing basically the same thing. Why did H.W. hate him to his grave, allegedly? Yeah.

I mean, basically because he's so uncouth. He puts the blatant imperial kind of neocolonial spin on what is supposed to be a selfless project. So he says things like, I can't believe we did that stupid Iraq war and we didn't even steal all the oil.

And I can't believe Barack Obama's got our troops in Syria and we're not even taking all the oil from them, which is exactly what he did. We got, you know, he had troops that stayed in eastern Syria occupying the oil and wheat fields all along. But he called it what it was instead of, you know, a bunch of spin.

And so I think that was really a big part of it. And because, look, just to win, to defeat a Bush and a Clinton in one year, he had to just denounce the entire establishment as being the most incompetent idiots who ruined everything, which happened to be true. So it really the insult stuck and they hate it because, you know, he made them just look terrible in order to climb into office on their backs. Yeah.

which was hilarious for us to watch, but it really bothered them. You can see, but wait, so I'm sorry. I'm generalizing first about the empire here, but that's the first answer is after the end of the cold war, we had the Bush's and the Clinton's and the Biden's and McCain and all these people in charge this whole time, not Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan and not wiser men, you know, strobe Talbot said,

Later, many years later, should we have had a higher, wiser conception of America's national interest instead of the more immediate gains that we could take at the time? Something like that's in The New York Times. Higher and wiser and strobe tablet. You'll find it.

And and then the answer is, yeah. In other words, they had a low they had a high time preference. They needed Lockheed dollars and Polish votes in Illinois and Pennsylvania. And so they went for NATO expansion. That was at the high, you know, one of their primary parts of their thinking on the program in the White House at the time in the 1990s. And and then, oh, is this going to sabotage our relationship with Russia into the 2020s? Yeah. But after all.

We're Democrat officials living in the 1990s. So that's our concern is doing what's good for us now. And the leaders of the 2020s, who will just happen to be Joe Biden and his friends, will work it out. And of course, Joe Biden was there egging Clinton on the whole time as they're doing it. And look, so.

But just to sum it up real quick, it's NATO expansion right up to Russia's borders. It's missile defense systems. It's the color-coded revolutions against Russia's friendly neighboring countries. I should say about the missile defense systems.

The anti-missile missiles are launched from dual-use launchers that can host Tomahawk cruise missiles that can be tipped with hydrogen bombs. So it was a violation of at least the spirit of the INF Treaty and maybe the letter of it, and certainly helped to...

change the strategic balance and force us into a new arms race. It's a horrible mistake for Bush to tear up that ABM treaty and in effect also the START II treaty, which he could have saved at the time, which is his father's treaty, which would have banned multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, which would have been the most important thing to happen for

human security ever probably right since the invention of Merv the un-invention of them on American and Russian rockets would have been the one of the greatest things we could have done but anyway um I digress and then the color-coded revolutions against all of the Russians friends and the continuing threat

To integrate Ukraine into America's military alliance right on Russia's border on their southern border. And they had been willing for the sake of trying to get along with America. They've been willing to tolerate the slap in the face of integrating the Baltic states together.

that are right on, you know, two of the three of them share a border with Russia and the other with Belarus, but close enough, you know, and that their Lithuania separates Russia from, and even Belarus from Russia's naval base Kaliningrad on the Baltic sea there. So when Bush added those Baltic States, W Bush added those Baltic States to NATO from the Eastern point of view, from the Russian point of view, looking West,

He left Kaliningrad stranded behind NATO lines, which is an obvious major potential flashpoint for war. They have this easement across Lithuania called the Sulwaki Corridor that at the start of this war, two and a half years ago, three years ago, the Poles closed the railroad and said, no, we're applying EU sanctions and we're going to prevent you from sending steel and concrete on this railroad to your military base.

And the Russians started, I don't want to get carried away. They started talking tough. I don't think they threatened war explicitly, but they were edging that way at least, uh,

I'd have to go back and check their exact statements, but it was clear that this was not going to fly. And then the Biden administration, the EU, told Lithuania to back down. And in fact, you know, the Lithuanian, I think it was the defense minister, deputy defense minister, something like that, even said, you know, we would never talk this tough against the Russians, except that we're part of NATO now. And we know America has our back, so we can't. It's like this is the definition of a moral hazard, right? In banking, this is a green span put.

I promise to bail you out. So go ahead and take risks that you otherwise would not take. It's right there in writing and told that to the New York times. I'm like, yeah, isn't this great? Now that I got American, now that my bigger brother's standing behind me, I can bully the kid down the street who otherwise would knock my block off. You know, it's just bananas thinking. Um, but, or, well, no, it's built into the incentive structure of the NATO alliance thinking is what it is. And, and it,

And look, Biden, when he came in, I'm skipping a lot, but when Biden came in, his idea was he's the hero facing down the bully. So Vladimir Putin is Hitler and Biden is Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and he's going to face him down. You can never appease a bully. You got to punch him in the nose. You can never fight him. If he does want to get in a fight, then fine. We're going to drag him down into the quicksand. We're going to bog him down. We're going to make it as hard for him as we possibly can. And.

And and so then that was what they did. And if you go back, I think any fair reading of the news stories in the history of 2021 and the lead up to the war in early 22 was that the Biden administration was willing to tell the Russians, you better not do it.

but they weren't willing to negotiate in good faith beyond that in any real way essentially they would threaten that if you do this we're going to put this economic war against you we're going to pour in all these weapons and make it difficult for you so you shouldn't we're going to try to drag the war out make it a strategic defeat for you in the long term and which is

In a way, they have succeeded in doing that. I think ultimately Russia will get the four eastern territories that they want, but it is quite a pyrrhic victory for them in a number of ways, just especially including the financial and man costs, human costs of their wars. What is the human cost? What have you seen? What is the human cost? Oh, I have no idea what the actual number is. They all exaggerate the other side and play down their own numbers.

I think it was in the, you know, it must be at least in the low hundreds of thousands on both sides killed. You know, I don't think, I don't believe millions killed in the higher numbers. And I, I don't believe probably that there's this gigantic discrepancy, certainly not one that favors the Ukrainian side, the way the Western media plays it. But I don't think there's any question that they've lost their,

What the absolute minimum, the most conservative estimate would be that both sides have lost high, high, high tens of thousands, near a thousand. Um,

uh certainly more than america lost in vietnam and and that those would be like the most conservative estimates that you could like possibly believe which is good and smart to do right there's no need to get carried away it's horrible enough as it is um i i think it's probably whatever i don't know low hundreds of thousands i guess would be my best guess but the thing is um

It didn't have to be this way. The Americans, you know, Stephen Walt from Harvard, John Mearsheimer's counterpart there at Harvard University. You know, I didn't go to college for this stuff, man. These guys, they talk this. You got pages in the textbook that describe the different scenarios already. They have models for it. And Walt said, listen, you have I'm probably paraphrasing him incorrectly. Forgive me, but you can read this at foreign policy dot com from early 22 before the war. He says, listen, I'm

You're applying the Hitlerian failed deterrence model.

But what you should be applying is the spiral model. That's on page 293. You got to flip over and you see how what actually is going on here is that both sides feel threatened and are reacting because they feel threatened. We're actually a cool voice might be able to calm things down and we can negotiate reassurances all around and negotiate, ramp this whole thing down before it comes to a crisis that could be done.

But if in your model, the other guy's Hitler and you have to face him down, that makes it very difficult. And of course, no surprise, the more the Americans acted like that, the more the Russians did too. And so in Putin's declaration war, well, really, there were kind of two of them. But in one of his declarations of war, I think it was, forgive me, it certainly was in a statement right at the beginning of the war. I think it was one of the two official declarations of war.

He, you know how the Americans always cite Munich when Neville Chamberlain tried to make a deal that Hitler can take Czechoslovakia, but he better not take anything more than that. And then he looks like such a heel because Hitler went on to Poland and the rest. And so they say, you never want to do like Munich, you know, you never want to, you know, make that mistake. Well, Putin invoked.

The same scenario, only he invoked the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was a.k.a. the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which was when they agreed to divide Poland and then forge a peace while Hitler turned west and fought all the Western democracies first before he turned around two years later and betrayed the Soviet Union and invaded anyway. So where the Americans always cite Munich...

Putin cites the Hitler-Stalin pact and says, we tried to appease the Hitlerian enemy before and it didn't work. And millions of our people were killed. We lost 450,000 in that war, including the Pacific. Yeah.

He goes, we lost millions of people in that war because of that mistake. We have no right to make that same mistake again. So he's invoking the appeasement model, the appeasing Hitler model of World War II in dealing with us the same way that our guys are dealing with him. And always with these guys, I hate to say this because look, like I'm really, fine, I read a lot and I wrote a book or two or whatever, but like,

Yeah.

They just don't lack in detail about what we're actually, this particular circumstance that's actually at issue, you know? Well, I mean, that's the obvious answer. But what if it's that they make these narratives basic and cartoon-like for the masses to sell them into narratives? You know, like, well, they've got a lot more cynical, complicated things.

behind the scenes motivating their actions, but they give out a kind of stupid comic book story for the masses. Wouldn't that be realistic to think about if they get to this level of power, they've got to know something besides the stupid cartoon version they give us. Right. Yeah. Well, look, it's always a conspiracy of interest. And I don't mean to say that they're not adults and don't like know what they're literally doing. But if you listen to them talk about why,

They really almost just invariably reach for these analogies, seemingly not out of a need to manipulate you, but just like that's their way of explaining it to you. I might do the same thing with a historical analogy. If you don't know the specific circumstance I'm talking about, I'll try to describe it and then maybe make a historical parallel or whatever. But it seems like they rely on the historical parallel to

more far more than any real details about what's happening in the country yeah you know i mean they'll switch to world war ii or they'll switch information war is more important than anything almost they have to keep selling the mob yeah or the masses or whatever they got to keep selling the masses on the comic book story to justify what they're doing which is just literal

waste of time, theft and pillage, murder, and it's all so stupid and evil, but you can't sell them on that because we're in a different world where the digital mass is

you know, they are king in terms of your narrative. It's not like the kings where they got to go on begging tours to raise money for their latest issue with somebody else, you know? Yeah. No, I mean, this is the perennial question is stupidity or the plan or whose stupid plan is this? What are we doing? I mean, the truth is everything that they touch just absolutely turns to mud to put it politely, right? They've just ruined everything that they've done.

I look, you know, I used to get criticized a lot for calling W. Bush stupid. And I guess people say, oh, you just hate Bush. But I never really was concerned with that. But the people who would say there are people who thought that I would say it like I was excusing him, essentially, that if the guy's stupid, then that diminishes from his responsibility. Right. That he is stupid.

You know, I'm like what I'm I'm pleading diminished capacity, your honor. He didn't know what he was doing, but I'm not saying that. I'm just saying, in fact, I'm saying, like, here's a guy who's one of the most willful leaders we've had. Right. I made a decision and I'm going to make it and I'm going to do it. And you can't say nothing. He's, you know, as decisive as he could be. And of course, 100 percent owns every decision that he ever made. Of course he does.

But also he's an idiot. That guy knows nothing. He doesn't ever even care to know.

On the eve of war, he said, what's a Sunni and a Shia? I thought they were all Muslims. He probably said Muslims because he's still like just he knows nothing. Right. He knows nothing. He's invading a country that super majority Shia ruled by minority Sunni dictator. And the Shia are friends with the Iranians that you don't control next door, dude. Who's the quote? Who's the source on that quote?

I'd forget now, but it was a sound one. It was a good one from inside the highest level of the council of this government. It wasn't like that fake guy. What's his name? Woodward? No, no, no. No, no, no. I don't think so.

And in fact, the only things I would cite from Woodward from that era is when he, well, hell, even here, I guess you're trusting him. But he, Bush turned over the National Security Council minutes to Woodward. Here, just let Bob have it. We like him. And boy, man, you read that first book, especially there's some stuff in there about letting Ben, well, I don't want to say too much over, over characterized by it.

They're very early determination to spread the war to Iraq and to let the American people know that this war is going to go on in time and place for a generation. They let them go in Afghanistan and Tora Bora, right? That's the famous. Sure did. Yeah, they did. And as everybody remembers, everybody's heard this a million times. Well, once he crossed the border, Osama bin Laden crossed that border into Pakistan, he slipped into Pakistan. Yeah.

Which means what? He's still right over there. He was like, wasn't he like right by their version of West Point in Pakistan, like his home? Yes. Where he has his Nintendo DSs. Yes, he was being protected by Pakistani intelligence, for sure. So, you know, Bush was not that motivated to bring him to justice.

No, of course not. He needed... Look, what good is a threat that Saddam Hussein could give chemical weapons to Osama bin Laden if Osama bin Laden's already dead? Well, if he was useful, why did Obama... If he was useful in that way, why did Obama get rid of him then? Because he wasn't useful anymore at the time? Well...

I think a decision had been made at that point by the Obama administration, by probably the president himself, that he did want the CIA to kill every last al-Qaeda guy hiding in Pakistan. And he waged a horrific drone war there. There were only, according to John Kiriakou, there were only 29 real al-Qaeda guys left in Pakistan at that time. But I think that all BS aside, Obama did tell the CIA that,

Real friends of Osama in Pakistan. I want you to hunt them down and explode them to death, and that includes him too. And whatever priority had been deprioritized. Dude, they admitted this. I mean, I remember it. We ran this at antiwar.com. I covered it on the show at the time. They admittedly publicly de-emphasized the hunt for him in the Bush years.

They diverted that manpower away almost immediately in preparation for Iraq, but they even like officially D prioritized it. It's an incredible, uh, what they did. But then, um, this is the thing I'll give Obama the most credit for out of anything was killing Osama bin Laden. And he did kill him there that day. I know there's a lot of different ideas going around about that, but he was killed there in Abbott about that day, as you say, right there, clearly under the protection of the Pakistani military. Um,

you know, under the protection of, you know, the Saudis as well, paying them off to keep him safe and sound there. So, yeah, that's... Our villains come along like kind of movie characters. They're propped up and then they're taken down when necessary. And you know what?

Just like I go on these tangents, but I've been I've been telling the same story about Russia. So in so many interviews, start talking about the Middle East again for a minute here. But no, look, overall, the bottom line about Ukraine is that the old Cold War never ended. They went from containment to friends to neo containment within just a few years. We're not going to bring them into our alliance forever.

And we're not going to shelve our alliance for this new broader partnership that would really include them. So where does that leave us? America is not coming home. We will be the dominant power in Europe. And for that matter, out of area, out of business, you got to keep going and expanding to the east. And of course, a lot of these countries, for very good historical reasons, would like to be under America's security protection because of their fear of the Russians.

But you see how it's all just a self-fulfilling prophecy. If America, especially the United States of America's national government, was not constantly giving the Russians reason to react, then they just there's no reason in the world to think that they would prioritize the kind of actions they're taking now over remaining in a friendly relationship with the West.

Building up a friendly relationship with America and our other European allies and friends was always Putin's highest priority until the United States just pushed it and pushed it and pushed it to the point where he decided, actually, if he had to sacrifice his entire relationship with the West, then fine. It would be worth it to go ahead and break off East Ukraine and just try to work out a new trading relationship with the nations of Asia and the rest of the world and get along without us.

And so I'm not justifying it. The book's not called justified. The book is not called. He had absolutely no choice, but yeah,

the it's called provoked because think of what an obvious lie it was for them to say unprovoked attack unprovoked attack unprovoked attack it's like you have to say that you're not even allowed to call it just russia's invasion you have to call it the unprovoked attack like it's saddam hussein's spider hole you just have to have this jargon that you they insist you must adopt and um and so um

Obviously, that was cover for the fact that, of course, they provoked it. They're the ones who put the Russians in the position of feeling like, well, I guess it's now or never. So we'll do it now while, you know, before it's too much more difficult to do. In fact, in the book, one more thing, I even quote some CIA officers. There's a journalist named Zach Dorfman.

And he wrote a series on the CIA in Ukraine right before the war and in the early days of it, I guess. And he quotes these CIA officers saying, it ain't our fault. We tried to tell the bosses that all these weapons that you're pouring in, it's not enough to deter Russia. It's just enough to provoke them into moving now, not later. We try to tell the CIA chiefs to tell the politicians to stop with the arms shipments for now.

But see, this is where Biden's comic book self-righteousness kicks in. He doesn't want to hear this kind of nuanced story.

ways of thinking we're supposed to be calibrating these weapons shipments to deter russia but as soon as a cia guy who literally has his hand on the dial says we should calibrate back to the left a little bit here boss and turn it down a little they don't want to listen nope that would be appeasement of hitler again and so they can only continue on and so that was it they they um

And they thought it wouldn't be that bad if he invaded because they clearly don't care at all about Ukraine and the Ukrainians. They're just cannon fodder in this broader morality play, where as you and your entire audience have heard a hundred times, you know that it's right that this is what Biden and his people said in the Post, the Times, the Journal and everywhere. Strategic defeat of Russia. We are going to bog them down. We're going to break them. We're going to make this war so expensive for them that

Putin's regime is going to fall and maybe we'll even break Russia into 10 pieces. As I cover in my book, they were talking like that. Like America is just going to dominate all of North Asia. Now, once we get rid of the regime in Moscow and, and they're full of just these insane and extremely dangerous pipe dreams and none of which has come true. And you know that the Russians will pay and are already paying and will continue to pay a severe economic price for

for the cost of this war, but not one that they can outbear. So you don't think that in the current state, I want to kind of land the plane here for now, and we can do something in the future again. But you think that with the news about Syria collapsing, the Syrian thing collapsing, a lot of people are saying, oh, this is a sign that Putin's weaker than Russia.

We've we thought since this war has gone on and maybe he's, maybe he's going to be pinched a little harder than we think. Economic downturn in Russia. Now they were doing well and now it's not so well. So because of the oil thing and all that, what's going on with Trump and the energy thing. No, they're making a killing off their oil. You know, the prices are high. The whole world's subsidizing their war through high oil prices now. But yeah,

I'm sorry. It's hyperbole. I'm sorry. I lost my train of thought there. The first part of that was, oh, them in Syria. Look, nobody ever said that Russia can fight a two front war. You know what I mean? Like that's the U.S. doctrine is we ought to be able to fight in Europe and Asia at the same time. No.

Nobody ever said the Russians were capable of that. They waged a war in Syria back 10 years ago when they had only, you know, the most modest support for rebels in the east of the country, fighters in the east of the country made up of eastern Ukrainians led by some Russian special operations forces in some cases, but with minimal effort by the Russians in what was going on in Ukraine at that time.

Right now, they're clearly bogged down in a major fight. The fact that they're not available to fight in Russia doesn't signal any new weakness. It symbolizes, if anything, just the status quo. I don't think anybody would be able to expect them

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and uh american frankly uh turkish american and israeli support for the uh hts uh you know al-qaeda in syria forces that were then assembling in the idlib province um that it was too and and their lightning moved to take over uh hama and hams and then lepo and i think it was in that or it was a lepo verse and then hama and hams and then on down to damascus um

That they were moving so quickly, maybe the Russians also told Putin that there wasn't much that they could do about it either. The Syrian Arab Army was basically dissolving at that time, I guess, and certainly not, you know, reforming to put up a valiant last stand. So maybe there was nobody for them to support with their air power at that time. So they just bugged out. So given what...

Yeah. Overall, look, the war is extremely expensive for them, though. Like, nobody can deny that. You take wealth and you turn it into weapons and explosives and then you destroy life and property with it. That's a net loss for everybody, at least eventually. You know, it's funny. You can read in The Washington Post. They'll laugh at him. Ha ha. He's wrecking Russia's economy. And on the next page, they'll be like...

Yeah, military Keynesianism is great for America. We're building up the defense industrial base. Get it, everybody? The military industrial complex, the crazy conspiracy theory, is now called the defense industrial base. And we love it. It's great when some Americans are forced to pay weapons contractors. Get it? Yeah.

Yeah, that's a pretty impressive con game they continue to play. So what do you think realistically happens now that Trump's in? Are we going to have a quick end of hostilities? Or do you think this is going to continue to drag on until it can try to destroy the Russian economy for another four years or whatever? Man, I really don't know, but I'm sure hoping for the former. I mean, Trump has made it clear that he's determined to end this thing. He says he wants to end it on day one. He wants a ceasefire before he takes office. And

And he's already this is an NBC and I don't think it was disputed anywhere that Trump is talking with the Biden government and the Zelensky government about this. They're working together, the three of them, not with the Russians yet, but the three of them are talking together right now during the transition. And Trump did win on this.

Yeah. But did they just announce that they did like a 10 year plan of weapons, arms deals for for Ukraine and all that? So we'll see how it goes that they don't want to have any real cessation of conflict here. Well, listen, we'll we'll see how it goes. This is the thing that Trump is best on.

At least rhetorically, you know, the war wasn't going on when he was in power. It was Biden who started the dang thing. So we don't know exactly what he'll do when his hand's on the rudder. When he was in charge before, he just did not control America-Russia policy at all. His government would not listen to him and would not do what he said.

I would like to think that he's sufficiently perturbed about that now that he really wants to take the reins of Russia policy and Ukraine policy and really know what it is that we're doing and why and see if he can do something different because it's just been horrible what they've done. So on the other hand, the Russians are in the position of strength on the ground, not America's side. So the question comes down really to how arrogant is Putin going to be in making his demands?

I mean, in truth, he doesn't even control all of Zaporozhye or Kherson, which he's claimed sovereignty over all of them. You know, all of that territory, those four eastern and southern provinces there. He controls virtually all of Luhansk, but not all of Donetsk even at this point. So...

But he's already annexed all four of these territories completely. And if the war keeps going and we don't have a peaceful settlement, he could really threaten Kharkiv and even Odessa on the Black Sea coast there, which would be, you know, that's Ukraine's last major port city. They would be landlocked away from the Black Sea and be devastated. What's left of Ukraine would be devastated if the Russians went that far away.

And they seem to be not in a hurry. They seem to be willing to fight this thing on and on, on a slow going artillery sort of rampage, taking feet at a time, you know, as they travel, um, they seem to be willing to do that. So what's, you know, what's the point of compromise there? I don't know. Like how Trump is supposed to make a deal when he doesn't really have anything to demand. Um,

And he's not going to sit there and just make promises. And if Putin escalates, Trump is going to have to play hardball, right? He can't just be a patsy here. He has to get out there and play tough and have demands and concessions. It's a terrible risk. And one of the conditions for ending the war would be that Trump goes ahead and brings Ukraine into NATO. What's left of Ukraine after giving up the EU? He's saying no, but we don't know yet. We don't know exactly what would happen now.

I like to think that there's enough even establishment voices that know just how absolutely unworkable that is. As Biden himself said in his Time magazine interview just in June or July in his exit interview with Time.

Ukraine is way too corrupt. Their political system and their economic system are both insanely corrupt and way outside of the rules of the EU or NATO democratic norms that must be fulfilled before you can join. You just can't. And, you know, that's not to say that, you know, we don't have our own brand of corruption, but...

Ukraine is the kind of thing where the new president nationalizes your company and gives it to his brother-in-law or something where it's just, you can't. This is like Tunisia brand corruption. We don't do it quite that way in the USA. You know what I mean? We'll just tax all your money away and buy ourselves a company with it or something like that. So anyway, they can't join NATO. It'd be insane to do it. But anyway.

If you know, I don't know. I really don't know that there Joe Biden has put the Ukrainians and as well as the, you know, entire Western alliance in a in a terrible position. And in fact, I mean, just think of the the political optics, as they call it. Right. The perception. If Trump tried to do anything reasonable and back down on America's NATO commitments, you

That maybe we're not promising a full war guarantee to these further Eastern European states anymore. You know, maybe NATO should be just a piece of paper rather than a gigantic military institution of its own in Brussels with its own interests of perpetuating itself. And maybe, you know, whatever. He does anything like moving anything toward the direction at all of scaling back America's commitments to NATO.

the American political establishment is going to completely freak. And you could understand from their point of view, if you pretend you're one of them for a minute, that this is again, backing down in the face of Hitlerian Putin's threats. You can't, you can never take a step back when you're dealing with the bad guy. They know that. And they, you know, again, that's why I'm sorry. I just have seen them say that so many times where it's like,

You know, like you go, oh, they're dumbing it down for the people. Dude, they are the people and they're dumb. You know what I mean? Like I got there's this lady from I got like 10 of them, you know, in the book going, well, look, a bully in the schoolyard. You got to punch him in the nose. Like they all say that. And how do they know that?

Cause they're the dork that was getting beat up by the bully. When the hero came and saved them by punching him in the nose, they were never the hero that saved the nerd from the bully. They're the nerd, you know? And, and, but then that's all they can do. So everything is either world war two or them getting beat up in junior high. And that's all they ever talk about. Yeah.

That's how they justify every bit of this. It's ridiculous. Yeah, they're a bunch of ridiculous big fat dorks. Their whole locker and their backpack running from class to class so that the jocks don't push them down. Yeah.

Well, Scott, I really appreciate your time. And it's been really fascinating. And as always, you do the best when it comes to giving us a book that can give us the full picture of the conflicts of du jour. Unfortunately, in the years I've interviewed you, there's been a lot of conflicts that you keep having to cover. So one day, one day we got to have world peace. So Scott has nothing to write about. What are you going to write about then?

I don't know, but I don't want to write any more books now. I don't want to. I got all that off my chest. And I'll say this. I know the book is massive and it's a little bit of a turnoff when you look at how many pages is it? Well, it's seven by 10, so it's only 690 pages, but you know, when it, the hardback and maybe the later paperback are going to be back at six by nine proportions and then it'll be 938 pages.

But, you know, about a third of that is footnotes. I have an absolute obsessive amount of citations, 7,000 citations, essentially 6,900 citations in there for you. Wait a minute. No, no, no. 8,000 citations, 7,900 because it's 6,000 footnotes. I'm going to ask you a question that you probably, maybe you got this question before, but you maybe not often. Since you are such a champion about writing these epic books, what's your advice for aspiring authors of any type?

to get started because they get intimidated at the thought of writing 200 or 300 pages and you're over there doing these marathons where you're getting these epic books done so what's your advice well you know probably not to write like i do yeah in fact here uh where is it check it out so i just got this book this is the british version of it it lacks america in the title

But this is a Harvard professor. It's called Hubris, the American origins of Russia's war against Ukraine. So you wrote the same book as me.

And in the title, great. And everything mine is provoked how America started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. His is hubris, the American origins of Russia's war in Ukraine. Like, it's great. So I started reading it. I'm barely into it, but I started reading it. And you can tell basically this guy knows everything that I know about it and a bunch of other stuff that I didn't know. He's got all these great quotes and footnotes and things that I didn't know about. I'm all mad. But it's like he knew all that on like his research project. And then he wrote a book.

But what I did was my book is the research project, right? So that's why his book is like 300 pages and mine is a thousand. Maybe he comes to some more establishment friendly conclusions and insights than yours does. Possibly. I don't, he comes off, he comes out swinging in the beginning. I think part of it is he's a Harvard professor. So if he just tells you that something is true, he accepts, he expects everything.

That you're going to accept that and believe that. They're like, everybody knows that's true or he wouldn't be saying it, whatever. Where I feel like the burden of proof is really on me. Cause I'm saying that everybody's wrong except me. Oh, but they admit it. And here's me showing them, admit how dumb they were to do the thing they did. So like,

that's the strength of the book in a way, but it could also be the weakness in it, right? Is the way that, in other words, my advice to your audience is they should write like Haslam writes. Jonathan Haslam is his name here. They should write like he writes, not like me. Because what I did is I just assembled 8,000,

note cards for you. Right. And then I try to drag you through it all and show it all to you. Now, I think I'm an okay writer. It's, you know, it ain't that bad. I try to not linger on points that I don't need to. And quite frankly, I don't have a lot to say about

As far as I know, it sounds ironic, but I mean, if you hear me blab, it's mostly a lot of recitation of data. You know what I mean? I don't go on and on and on for pages telling you how I think and feel about stuff and, and how America's political culture is nowadays and all this kind of thing. Cause that's really for smarter dogs than me. Right. My thing is just, I'm a footnote compiler. And then, um, so, uh, I would not recommend, uh,

However, like as far as just people who are wanting to write and they're like afraid to get started, I think this much probably is okay to say. If like, don't follow my role model kid, but like make an outline and then just fill it out, man. Just keep going. Like, I don't know the first thing about writing fiction and I wouldn't know anything about that. But like, if you have a bunch of topics that you want to tackle, right?

You know, the thing is about working in a word document or whatever your favorite program is. So you can change everything all the time, man. You don't have to rewrite everything on paper with a pencil. Go ahead and create yourself a giant outline. And each time you go, Oh, I know what I need to have here. Just have a line, just make a new paragraph and go, Oh, right here. I need to make sure and write about that one thing. Just put, you know what I do? I do brackets note to sell. You know, I don't say notes up, but anytime there's a triple brackets in the text, uh,

That's me reminding myself that I got to get back to something here someday or whatever. Right. And then I go on. Oh, note to self. Don't forget. Remember that one thing that was in the Washington Post that one time. OK. And then keep writing and then go back to that later if you need to. And then you can drag and drop it around however you want. Put it in whatever order you want and then, you know, try to tell the story through. And then, you know, I wrote this book over two and a half years. So I wrote the whole thing out of order. I'd be working on Russiagate for decades.

All morning. And then I'd be working on Bosnia again in the afternoon. And then I'd be working. I'm working in order of tabs open. Right. I'm like, I'm the worst. Don't don't do it like me. But it works out because, you know, punching everything in out of order. I can still drag and drop it however I want. I can rewrite any sentence however I want and try to make it flow and.

It should be good enough. I was told by a guy who doesn't really like me, but was reading the book and said that like, Hey, it's very punchy and readable and good. So like, I know it's, it's a task, but, um, Hey, it's me. Right. I'm not like a college professor. I'm a lot of fun. Do you have an audio version of it available or coming? Coming soon. Yes. Um,

My sub stack is scotthortonshow.com. Okay. And I've already recorded the HW Bush chapter and I'm like a probably third of the way through Clinton, but I've been doing so many interviews. I haven't had time, but I'm going to hopefully get back to it this weekend.

And knock out the rest of the audio book. And then that's going to be like Martyr Made, a subscription podcast series there. The audio book? The audio book. Yeah, because it's going to be like 45 hours long or some kind of crazy thing. And it'll eventually be an audible standalone audio book on its own. But I'm going to have to put it out as a series first there. Yeah, that makes sense. Hey, what was one thing you learned that you changed your mind about, about the whole topic of Russia and Ukraine and us?

through the process of this something stick out to you? Like, man, I thought it was this way and it's actually that way. Yeah. Let's see. There must've been a few of those in there. You know, the one that comes most obviously to mind is the, it doesn't really change it overall. I don't think, but it's, I guess I have a more nuanced understanding of the Newland phone call thing there. And I,

the role that they were attempting to play in forging what amounted to a compromise to force the sitting president to accept early elections and their choice of prime minister. And, you know, I had probably, you know, and I think a lot of people do this sort of just like it's shorthand because, well, what do you know? A couple of weeks later, Yatsenyuk is literally the prime minister. And so, yeah.

But the thing is, there was, they were discussing a compromise. But the thing is, the protest leaders had already rejected the compromise. They were holding out for the president to resign, which is eventually what they got. Because even when the major protest leaders finally agreed to a deal that would include early elections, the rest of the protest leaders said, oh, yeah, well, we'll shoot him dead by 10 a.m. if he doesn't leave town. And that was what really accomplished

The overthrow was not, you know, a CIA, an American act, but an act by the Nazis themselves.

the movement on the Maidan, who, of course, the entire movement was supported by the West, paid for by the West, and was, you know, basically a big astroturf project, but included some grassroots, like a bunch of Hitlerians, who are the ones who ended up leading the push. So I think, you know, probably in the past, I retold that story into Truncated of a fashion where it's like, well, they're plotting the coup, and then what do you know? They have their guy, but it was like,

Well, they're plotting. See, so my argument is it's still a coup anyway. You know, nobody ever said that it was a coup d'etat, like by the absolute strictest definition, because that usually means right. Like you're the general kills the president and replaces him. Something like that. This is a street.

What language is that? French, German? I don't know. But then, you know, I got in a fight with this guy that interviewed me and was all trying to quibble and argue all these semantics with me about what kind of coup it was. So I asked my chat GPT, I says to it, I says, what are all of the different French coup names for overthrow of a government?

And they gave me like 10. And it didn't include like irrelevant ones like coup de grace or whatever that are not about that. But it had like coup de judiciary, coup de parliamentary shenanigans, coup de all different kinds of ways to do it. How about coup de America and its allies spend tens of millions of dollars supporting NGOs that support a giant carnival protest movement for three months so they can force the president to agree to early elections and

And then the Nazis threatened to murder him the next day and he runs away. What do you call that in French? I don't care what you call it in French. It's a coup de America intervening where they got no business and absolutely making the difference where otherwise would have gone the other way. Just the mob gets a little out of their hands. A lot of times too. That happens. They use the mob as a negotiating tactic. And then the mob eats up and goes and does their own thing. In fact, the guy that jumped up on the stage,

And said, no, we reject the deal. We do not support it. And we will not accept the deal where the president doesn't leave. The criminal doesn't leave office. And he says, and if he doesn't leave, because he kind of like just gets carried away, I guess, if he doesn't.

if he doesn't leave town by 10 a.m., we're going to go there and kill him. I swear to God. Well, the guy who said that was named Paris yuck. And he was the same guy who led the snipers that started shooting the cops the morning before that started the big riot. And I'm not saying he was the leader of the guys inside the hotel Ukraine, because I don't think I know that, but he clearly was in charge of firing on cops and led a team of snipers firing on cops from the music conservatory. Um,

that had really started the very heightening of tensions that led to, first of all, pushing the agreement through, but then the overall putsch. And then he was the, you know, Reuters and Voice of America and whatever, not Voice of America, sorry, Radio Free Europe. They all said he was the toast of Kiev. Everybody called him the big hero because he had threatened to kill the president. And as Andrew Kramer in the New York Times said, this was a credible threat that, you know, the guy had to leave because they were going to murder him.

And that was how it happened. So, you know, anyway, I don't think I ever said that, oh, the phone call explains that part. I never oversimplified it that much. This is just me retelling you sort of a longer, clumsier version of it. But I'm sure that in the past I had oversimplified the phone call as them simply plotting to just overthrow the government and replace it when really it was more like they were trying to force the president aside and

and to accept the rulership of their guys under his umbrella until new elections could be held, which he was sure to lose anyway. So anyway, but... Well, Scott, can you hold up the book up close? What do you call that in French? I don't know. Can you hold the book up close so we can see it? I see it over there, but I want to give people a chance. I got one. Yes. There you go. Provoked. Washington started the new Cold War with Russia, the catastrophe in Ukraine. Mearsheimer called it manna from heaven.

For those who want to know the history of how America mistreated the Russians after the end of the last Cold War. So Ron Paul liked it and a bunch of other folks. So if you like Ron Paul, which is everybody, then you got to read my book. All right, Scott. Thank you again. Great work doing this. This is very important. Hey, thank you for having me. And sorry for rambling so much, but I had a great time. I always have a great time with you. We're going to do it again.

Bye.