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mikhail gorbachev
The Dangerous Silence on Nuclear War 60 Years After Famous 'Daisy Ad'
When Harris delivered her acceptance speech in Chicago, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.
Sep 09, 2024
One evening in early September 1964, a frightening commercial jolted 50 million Americans who were partway through watching “Monday Night at the Movies” on NBC. The ad began with an adorable three-year-old girl counting petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then came a man’s somber voiceover, counting down from ten to zero. Then an ominous roar and a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb explosion.
The one-minute TV spot reached its climax with audio from President Lyndon Johnson, concluding that “we must love each other, or we must die.” The ad did not mention his opponent in the upcoming election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, but it didn’t need to. By then, his cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons was well established.
Goldwater’s bestseller The Conscience of a Conservative, published at the start of the decade, was unnervingly open to the idea of launching a nuclear war, while the book exuded disdain for leaders who “would rather crawl on knees to Moscow than die under an Atom bomb.” Closing in on the Republican nomination for president, the Arizona senator suggested that “low-yield” nuclear bombs could be useful to defoliate forests in Vietnam.
His own words gave plenty of fodder to others seeking the GOP nomination. Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton called Goldwater “a trigger-happy dreamer” and said that he “too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world.” New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller unloaded with a rhetorical question: “How can there be sanity when he wants to give area commanders the authority to make decisions on the use of nuclear weapons?”
- YouTubeyoutu.be
So, the stage was set for the “daisy ad,” which packed an emotional wallop -- and provoked a fierce backlash. Critics cried foul, deploring an attempt to use the specter of nuclear annihilation for political gain. Having accomplished the goal of putting the Goldwater camp on the defensive, the commercial never aired again as a paid ad. But national newscasts showed it while reporting on the controversy.
Today, a campaign ad akin to the daisy spot is hard to imagine from the Democratic or Republican nominee to be commander in chief, who seem content to bypass the subject of nuclear-war dangers. Yet those dangers are actually much higher now than they were 60 years ago. In 1964, the Doomsday Clock maintained by experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at 12 minutes to apocalyptic midnight. The ominous hands are now just 90 seconds away.
Yet, in their convention speeches this summer, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were silent on the need to engage in genuine diplomacy for nuclear arms control, let alone take steps toward disarmament.
Trump offered standard warnings about Russian and Chinese arsenals and Iran’s nuclear program, and boasted of his rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Left unmentioned was Trump’s presidential statement in 2017 that if North Korea made “any more threats to the United States,” that country “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Nor did he refer to his highly irresponsible tweet that Kim should be informed “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
When Harris delivered her acceptance speech, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.
Now in high gear, the 2024 presidential campaign is completely lacking in the kind of wisdom about nuclear weapons and relations between the nuclear superpowers that Lyndon Johnson and, eventually, Ronald Reagan attained during their presidencies.
Johnson privately acknowledged that the daisy commercial scared voters about Goldwater, which “we goddamned set out to do.” But the president was engaged in more than an electoral tactic. At the same time that he methodically deceived the American people while escalating the horrific war on Vietnam, Johnson pursued efforts to defuse the nuclear time bomb.
“We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions,” Johnson said at the conclusion of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, on June 25, 1967. But fifty-seven years later, there is scant evidence that the current or next president of the United States is genuinely interested in improving such understanding between leaders of the biggest nuclear states.
Two decades after the summit that defrosted the Cold War and gave rise to what was dubbed “the spirit of Glassboro,” President Reagan stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.” But such an attitude would be heresy in the 2024 presidential campaign.
“These are the stakes,” Johnson said in the daisy ad as a mushroom cloud rose on screen, “to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.”
Those are still the stakes. But you wouldn’t know it now from either of the candidates vying to be the next president of the United States.
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Presidents Who Gamble With Nuclear Armageddon
Each of the last five presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, have brought us closer to the brink. We desperately need leaders with a knack for peace who can steer the nation, and the world, toward a more secure and less dangerous future.
May 29, 2024
The overriding job of any U.S. president is to keep the nation safe. In the nuclear age, that mainly means avoiding nuclear Armageddon. Joe Biden’s reckless and incompetent foreign policy is pushing us closer to annihilation. He joins a long and undistinguished list of presidents who have gambled with Armageddon, including his immediate predecessor and rival, Donald Trump.
Talk of nuclear war is currently everywhere. Leaders of NATO countries call for Russia’s defeat and even dismemberment, while telling us not to worry about Russia’s 6,000 nuclear warheads. Ukraine uses NATO-supplied missiles to knock out parts of Russia’s nuclear-attack early-warning system inside Russia. Russia, in the meantime, engages in nuclear drills near its border with Ukraine. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg give the green light to Ukraine to use NATO weapons to hit Russian territory as an increasingly desperate and extremist Ukrainian regime sees fit.
These leaders neglect at our greatest peril the most basic lesson of the nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis, as told by President John F. Kennedy, one of the few American presidents in the nuclear age to take our survival seriously. In the aftermath of the crisis, Kennedy told us, and his successors:
Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.
Yet this is exactly what Biden is doing today, carrying out a bankrupt and reckless policy.
Nuclear war can easily arise from an escalation of non-nuclear war, or by a hothead leader with access to nuclear arms deciding on a surprise first strike, or by a gross miscalculation. The last of these nearly occurred even after Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev had negotiated an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when a disabled Soviet submarine came within a hair’s breadth of launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo.
The Doomsday Clock was at 17 minutes to midnight when Clinton came to office, but just 9 minutes when he left it. Bush pushed the clock to just 5 minutes, Obama to 3 minutes, and Trump to a mere 100 seconds. Now Biden has taken the clock to 90 seconds.
Most presidents, and most Americans, have little idea how close to the abyss we are. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which was founded in 1947 in part to help the world avoid nuclear annihilation, established the Doomsday Clock to help the public understand the gravity of the risks we face. National security experts adjust the clock depending how far or how close we are to “midnight,” meaning extinction. They put the clock today at just 90 seconds to midnight, the closest that it’s ever been in the nuclear age.
The clock is a useful measure of which presidents have “gotten it” and which have not. The sad fact is that most presidents have recklessly gambled with our survival in the name of national honor, or to prove their personal toughness, or to avoid political attacks from the warmongers, or as the result of sheer incompetence. By a simple and straightforward count, five presidents have gotten it right, moving the clock away from midnight, while nine have moved us closer to Armageddon, including the most recent five.
Truman was president when the Doomsday Clock was unveiled in 1947, at 7 minutes to midnight. Truman stoked the nuclear arms race and left office with the clock at just 3 minutes to midnight. Eisenhower continued the nuclear arms race but also entered into the first-ever negotiations with the Soviet Union regarding nuclear disarmament. By the time he left office, the clock was put back to 7 minutes to midnight.
Kennedy saved the world by coolly reasoning his way through the Cuban Missile Crisis, rather than following the advice of hothead advisors who called for war (for a detailed account, see Martin Sherwin’s magisterial Gambling with Armageddon, 2020). He then negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Khrushchev in 1963. By the time of his death, which may well have been a government coup resulting from Kennedy’s peace initiative, JFK had pushed the clock back to 12 minutes to midnight, a magnificent and historic achievement.
It was not to last. Lyndon Johnson soon escalated in Vietnam and pushed the clock back again to just 7 minutes to midnight. Richard Nixon eased tensions with both the Soviet Union and China, and concluded the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), pushing the clock again to 12 minutes from midnight. Yet Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter failed to secure SALT II, and Carter fatefully and unwisely gave a green light to the CIA in 1979 to destabilize Afghanistan. By the time Ronald Reagan took office, the clock was at just 4 minutes to midnight.
The next 12 years marked the end of the Cold War. Much of the credit is due to Mikhail Gorbachev, who aimed to reform the Soviet Union politically and economically, and to end the confrontation with the West. Yet credit is also due to Reagan and his successor George Bush, Sr., who successfully worked with Gorbachev to end the Cold War, which in turn was followed by the end of the Soviet Union itself in December 1991. By the time Bush left office, the Doomsday clock was at 17 minutes to midnight, the safest since the start of the nuclear age.
Sadly, the U.S. security establishment could not take “Yes” for an answer when Russia said an emphatic yes to peaceful and cooperative relations. The U.S. needed to “win” the Cold War, not just end it. It needed to declare itself and prove itself to be the sole superpower of the world, the one that would unilaterally write the rules of a new U.S.-led “rules-based order.” The post-1992 U.S. therefore launched wars and expanded its vast network of military bases as it saw fit, steadfastly and ostentatiously ignoring the red lines of other nations, indeed aiming to drive nuclear adversaries into humiliating retreats.
Since 1992, every president has left the U.S. and the world closer to nuclear annihilation than his predecessor. The Doomsday Clock was at 17 minutes to midnight when Clinton came to office, but just 9 minutes when he left it. Bush pushed the clock to just 5 minutes, Obama to 3 minutes, and Trump to a mere 100 seconds. Now Biden has taken the clock to 90 seconds.
Biden has led the U.S. into three fulminant crises, any one of which could end up in Armageddon. By insisting on NATO enlargement to Ukraine, against Russia’s bright red line, Biden has repeatedly pushed for Russia’s humiliating retreat. By siding with a genocidal Israel, he has stoked a new Middle East arms race and a dangerously expanding Middle East conflict. By taunting China over Taiwan, which the U.S. ostensibly recognizes as part of one China, he is inviting a war with China. Trump similarly stirred the nuclear pot on several fronts, most flagrantly with China and Iran.
Washington seems of a single mind these days: more funding for wars in Ukraine and Gaza, more armaments for Taiwan. We slouch ever closer to Armageddon. Polls show the American people overwhelmingly disapprove of U.S. foreign policy, but their opinion counts for very little. We need to shout for peace from every hilltop. The survival of our children and grandchildren depends on it.Keep ReadingShow Less
The Planet Can’t Survive the Business of War
Wars and their escalation—the mass destruction of human life that is almost invariably accompanied by destruction of the natural world—happen because preparations for war bring leaders ever closer to the brink.
Aug 29, 2023
A new war, a new alibi. When we think about our latest war—the one that began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just six months after our Afghan War ended so catastrophically—there is a hidden benefit. As long as American minds are on Ukraine, we are not thinking about planetary climate disruption. This technique of distraction obeys the familiar mechanism that psychologists have called displacement. An apparently new thought and feeling becomes the substitute for harder thoughts and feelings you very much want to avoid.
Every news story about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest demand for American or European weaponry also serves another function: the displacement of a story about, say, the Canadian fires which this summer destroyed a forest wilderness the size of the state of Alabama and 1,000 of which are still burning as this article goes to press. Of course, there is always the horrific possibility that Ukraine could pass from a “contained” to a nuclear war, as out of control as those Canadian fires. Yet we are regularly assured that the conflict, close to the heart of Europe, is under careful supervision. The war has a neatly framed villain (Vladimir Putin) and—thanks to both the U.S. and NATO—a great many good people containing him. What could possibly go wrong?
A fantasy has taken root among well-meaning liberals. Ukraine, they believe, is the “good war” people like them have been searching for since 1945. “This is our Spain,” young enthusiasts have been heard to say, referring to the Spanish Republican war against fascism. In Ukraine in the early 2020s, unlike Spain in the late 1930s, the Atlantic democracies will not falter but will go on “as long as it takes.” Also, the climate cause will be assisted along the way, since Russia is a large supplier of natural gas and oil, and the world needs to unhook itself from both.
No less irresponsible has been the choice to perpetuate the war habit even as we recognize the inseparable role wars have always played in the destruction of the planet.
That theory got tested a year ago, with the underwater sabotage of Russia’s Nordstream natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. President Joe Biden, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland all welcomed that environmental disaster. In an eventually deleted message the former Polish foreign minister and war advocate Radislaw Sikorski tweeted thanks to the U.S. for what he took to be a transparently American operation. The American media, however, treated the attack as an imponderable mystery, some reports even suggesting that Russia might have destroyed its own invaluable pipeline for reasons yet to be fathomed. Then, in a February 2023 article, the independent investigative reporter Seymour Hersh traced the attack to the U.S., and later Western reports would come halfway to his conclusion by assigning credit to Ukraine, or a pro-Ukrainian group. As of late summer, all reporting on the Nordstream disaster seems to have stopped. What has not stopped is the killing. The numbers of dead and wounded in the Ukraine war are now estimated at nearly half a million, with no end in sight.
The Nordstream wreck was only one attention-getting catastrophe within the greater horror that a war always is. An act of industrial sabotage on a vast scale, it was also an act of environmental terrorism, causing the largest methane leak in the history of the planet. According to a report in Forbes, “The subsequent increase in greenhouse gases… was equivalent to as much as 32% of Denmark’s annual emissions.”
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was an illegal and immoral act, but the adjective that usually follows illegal and immoral is “unprovoked.” In truth, this war was provoked. A contributing cause, impossible to ignore, was the eastward extension of NATO, always moving closer to the western borders of Russia, in the years from 1991 to 2022. That expansion was gradual but relentless. Consider the look of such a policy to the country—no longer Communist and barely a great power—which, in 2013, American leaders again began to describe as an adversary.
With the end of the Cold War in 1991 (the very global conflict that gave NATO its reason for being), the eastward projection of the alliance accelerated dramatically. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, all former members of the Soviet bloc, were brought into NATO in 1999; and 2004 witnessed an even richer harvest of former satellites of the USSR: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, all either near to or bordering on Russia. Then came the Bucharest Summit Declaration of April 2008: Georgia and Ukraine, the NATO heads of state announced, would be given the opportunity to apply for membership at some future date. If you want to know why Putin and his advisers might have considered this a security concern for Russia, look at a map.
Counterfeit Solidarity
The United States has supported Ukraine with copious donations of weapons, troop-trainers, and logistical and technical advisers left to work the interoperable targeting equipment we “share” with that country. Between 2014 and 2022, NATO drilled at least 10,000 Ukrainian troops per year in advanced methods of warfare. In the war itself, weapons supplies have climbed steadily from Stinger and Javelin missiles to Abrams tanks (whose greenhouse-gas environmental footprint is 0.6 miles per gallon of gas, or 300 gallons every eight hours of use), to cluster bombs, and most recently the promise of F-16s.
All this has put fresh wind in the sails of the weapons manufacturers of the American military-industrial-congressional complex. In May 2022, the CEO of Lockheed Martin thanked President Biden personally for his kindness. F-16s, after all, are big money-makers. As for the additional fuel that ordinary Ukrainians require, it is now being sequestered underground by Ukrainian commodities traders at enormous environmental risk.
Wars and their escalation—the mass destruction of human life that is almost invariably accompanied by destruction of the natural world—happen because preparations for war bring leaders ever closer to the brink. So close, in fact, that it feels natural to go on. That was certainly the case with Russia, Ukraine, and NATO, and the escalation that followed. Examples of such escalation are indeed the rule, not the exception in time of war.
Think of the invention, testing, and strategic planning that led to the dropping of the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In Jon Else’s extraordinary documentary The Day After Trinity, the physicist Freeman Dyson offered a sober analysis of the momentum driving the decision to use the bomb:
“Why did the bomb get dropped on people at Hiroshima? I would say: It’s almost inevitable that it would have happened—simply because all the bureaucratic apparatus existed by that time to do it. The air force was ready and waiting. There had been prepared big airfields in the island of Tinian in the Pacific from which you could operate. The whole machinery was ready.”
In the same sense, all the apparatus was in place for the war in Ukraine. Joe Biden, a conventional cold warrior, has always had a temperament rather like that of President Harry Truman. The Biden of 2023, like the Truman of 1945, comes across as impulsive, not deliberate. He likes to pop off, thinks he is appreciated for taking risks, and fancies himself particularly good under pressure. This state of mind partly accounts for his decision to label Vladimir Putin a “war criminal”: never mind that such a description would apply with equal truth to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for launching the invasion of Iraq in 2003—a war that Biden, as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, supported unreservedly. His insistence that “this man [Putin] cannot remain in power for god’s sake” and his belief (as of mid-July 2023) that “Putin has already lost the war” exhibit the same pattern of effusive moralism accompanied by a denial of inconvenient facts.
A different perspective was offered by Anatol Lieven at the Responsible Statecraft website:
“We are repeatedly told that the war in Ukraine is a war to defend democracy and help secure it across the world. Our American, French, and British ancestors (and even the Russians, from March to October 1917) were also told the same about the Allied side in the First World War. It did not quite work out that way, and nothing guarantees that it will happen that way in Ukraine.”
In the case of Ukraine, such false hopes have been pushed far more freely by the media than by the military. War is a drug, and they have chosen to be the dealers.
The Media Airbrush
War propaganda can be delivered in picturesque as well as popular ways. A prime example of the former approach was Roger Cohen’s August 6 front-page New York Times story, “Putin’s Forever War,” based on a recent visit. (“I spent a month in Russia.”) The apologetic intent here is underscored in the headline, which picks up an epithet once applied to the disastrous American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and slyly transfers it to Russia. The coverage is all in the same key, over six full pages of the paper Times, bulked out with color photographs of cheerleaders, churches, dank stairways, military processions, statues, tombs, and models on a fashion shoot.
From the start, Cohen adopts the voice of a prophetic observer of a new war, even as he makes it sound a good deal like the old war with the Soviet Union. “Along the way,” he writes,
“I encountered fear and fervid bellicosity, as well as stubborn patience to see out a long war. I found that Homo sovieticus, far from dying out, has lived on in modified form, along with habits of subservience. So with the aid of relentless propaganda on state television, the old Putin playbook—money, mythmaking, and menace of murder—has just about held.”
The name Putin appears with great regularity as the article proceeds, doing extra duty for the historical analysis and exposition that are mostly absent.
“I first visited Moscow,” writes Cohen, “four decades ago, when it was a city devoid of primary colors eking out existence in the penury of Communism.” But Moscow has changed and the reason is Putin: “He opened Russia, only to slam it shut to the West; he also modernized it, while leaving the thread to Russia’s past unbroken.” So here, as in many Western accounts, the problem turns out to be not just Putin but the fact that he embodies a backward, naturally vengeful, country and its irretrievable past. The people of Russia are lost and—a few courageous dissidents excepted—they are given over to primitivism, hopeless nostalgia, and of course aggression. Putin is their epitome.
He “governs from the shadows”—no point in skipping the vampire trope—“unlike Stalin, whose portrait was everywhere. There is no cult of the leader of the kind Fascist systems favored. Yet mystery has its own magnetism. The reach of Mr. Putin’s power touches all.” There is, in other words, a cult of personality without either the personality or the display that belong to such a cult: “Putinism is a postmodern compilation of contradictions. It combines mawkish Soviet nostalgia with Mafia capitalism, devotion to the Orthodox Church with the spread of broken families.” It did not take a month in Russia to write those sentences. A day at The New York Times would have sufficed.
The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev finally emerges as the hero of this story. Nowhere quoted, however, is the Gorbachev who, between 2004 and 2018, contributed eight op-eds to The New York Times, the sixth of which focused on climate change and the eighth on the perilous renewal of a nuclear arms race. Gorbachev was deeply troubled by George W. Bush’s decision to withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty (which Putin called a “mistake”) and Donald Trump’s similar decision to pull out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Does anyone doubt that Gorbachev would have been equally disturbed by the Biden administration’s virtual severance of diplomatic relations with Russia?
In an October 25, 2018, op-ed, Gorbachev summed up the American tendency throughout the preceding two decades: “The United States has in effect taken the initiative in destroying the entire system of international treaties and accords that served as the underlying foundation for peace and security following World War II.” Notice that the bellicose American “initiative” began well before the ascent of Vladimir Putin and, according to Gorbachev, it possessed—like the expansion of NATO—a dynamism that operated independently of developments inside Russia.
Return to Earth
The major news of the summer, besides the apparent lack of success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, has been Russia’s sudden cancellation of the Black Sea grain deal—a decision prompted in some measure by a July 17 Ukrainian drone attack on the Kerch Bridge. This is the bridge that has served to connect Russia to Crimea, after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014; and the drone strike was part of a continuing Ukrainian-NATO effort to undermine—by sanctions, among other means—Russia’s export of its own grain. A typical Western media report about these developments in The Washington Post declined to associate the two events; as if the Ukrainian attack had occurred by coincidence just “hours before” the Russian termination of the deal and its own attacks on Ukrainian grain storage facilities. The events are referred to as “twin developments,” and that is all.
In a recent article at TomDispatch, Michael Klare recalled the public shame that never properly attached to U.S. energy companies for “choosing to perpetuate practices known to accelerate climate change and global devastation. Among the most egregious, the decision of top executives of the ExxonMobil Corporation—the world’s largest and wealthiest privately-owned oil company—to continue pumping oil and gas for endless decades after their scientists warned them about the risks of global warming.”
Such environmental indifference, as Klare rightly notes, persisted long after the reality of climate disruption was recognized by the polluters. No less irresponsible has been the choice to perpetuate the war habit even as we recognize the inseparable role wars have always played in the destruction of the planet. The Ukraine war was launched by Russia in an exertion of brutal short-term opportunism, but it was also provoked by the United States as one of a long series of wars and regime-change operations that were meant to give the U.S. uncontested leadership of a unipolar world.
All of us now inhabit a war planet threatened in other devastating ways as well. Our escape will not be achieved through a new “norms-based” international order in which NATO, with the U.S. at the helm, replaces the United Nations as the global authority presiding over war and peace. The “next war on the horizon,” whether in the Baltic Sea, the Persian Gulf, or Taiwan, is a matter of grave interest to the citizens on all those horizons who may want anything but to serve as its field of exercise. Meanwhile, the lesson for the United States should be simple enough: The survival of the planet cannot wait for the world’s last superpower to complete our endless business of war.
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The Lasting Impacts of Mikhail Gorbachev's Squandered Legacy
Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation, remembers the Russian leader—whom she called a friend—as a committed pro-peace thinker, on this week's "Scheer Intelligence."
Sep 09, 2022
Mikhail Gorbachev, who died at the age of 91 on August 30, was "perhaps the most radical thinker about security to ever lead a major power," writes Katrina vanden Heuvel in The Nation, the progressive magazine where the journalist serves as editorial director and publisher. In the deeply moving piece, where vanden Heuvel describes her personal relationship to the man who called both her and her late husband--the unparalleled scholar of Russian history, Stephen Cohen--his "true friends," she considers the former Russian leader's legacy as "a great reformer in his country's tormented history." Vanden Heuvel, who is not only fluent in Russian and studied Russian history at Princeton University but has lived in the Soviet Union and Russia, joins Robert Scheer on the latest edition of "Scheer Intelligence" to expand on her Nation piece and the consequences of the squandering of Gorbachev's legacy.
In a wide-ranging conversation where neither of them shy away from the complexities of the Cold War, Scheer and vanden Heuvel recount the time they spent together in Moscow in 1987 as the then-Los Angeles Times correspondent Scheer was on loan to Moskovskie Novosti (Moscow News), where vanden Heuvel also worked in 1989. The country they describe taking shape under Gorbachev's extraordinary vision for a peaceful future for both Russia and the rest of the world is one that, tragically, is no more. As The Nation publisher puts it, his "historic achievements" were undermined not only by Russians like his successors Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, but by U.S. and other Western leaders profoundly disinterested in giving peace a chance. After writing that NATO's eastward expansion was a "stab in Gorbachev's back," vanden Heuvel shares with Scheer her fears that the ongoing war in Ukraine is further confining the former Russian leader's revolutionary work towards nuclear disarmament to the "dustbin of history," to borrow a phrase from Leon Trotsky.
The brinkmanship in which the U.S., Russia, and other nuclear powers are currently engaged--the kind that Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending--could lead us down an apocalyptic path, the two journalists warn. The antidote, vanden Heuvel argues, is a strong peace movement in the U.S. and around the globe and pro-peace leaders following in the radical footsteps of Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Olof Palme, and others. Listen to the full conversation between vanden Heuvel and Scheer as they consider all the world has lost in losing Gorbachev--both in 1991 and 2022.
Transcript
Robert Scheer:
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest, in this case, one of the great figures, actually, in journalism in America, Katrina vanden Heuvel, who for the longest time, has been involved with The Nation magazine as editor in chief. Now she's the executive editor and publisher.
The Nation magazine, for people who don't know it, is the oldest continuously published political journal in the United States. Goes back to Civil War days. Katrina has kept it alive for decades as a vital organ and I've asked her to come today because the two of us crossed paths when Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev had just taken power. I was there in '87, I think, the first time we met there, and he had taken power in 1985. Then, of course, he was kicked out of power six years later.
Katrina wrote a piece for The Nation magazine, which I think we haven't paid enough attention to Gorbachev's significance. But she had a piece this last week where she talks about what a historic opportunity that was and that basically, it was blown and that's one of the reasons why or the main reason why we're now considering, we're in de facto, or in reality a war with Russia with the possibility even of nuclear war.
I'll let you set the stage. You were there. You were a Russian speaker. You studied the subject at Princeton. You were married to a great expert on Russia and on the Soviet Union, Steve Cohen, probably the most important expert we've had, so set the stage.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
The stage, so as your listeners may know, Gorbachev came to power in March 1985, and he came after a series of stagnant leaders. I mean, there was Brezhnev, and then Andropov, and then Chernenko, who literally was working out of his hospital room. It was not clear that Gorbachev would be the leader. He was 53. Gromyko said when he was appointed, Gorbachev was, that he has a nice smile and steel teeth, iron teeth.
It could have been the Romanov, who was the Communist Party secretary in Leningrad, Saint Petersburg, but he had thrown China at the wall at his daughter's wedding a week before the appointment, so he didn't get it, but more important, Gorbachev comes into power. It's not immediate. As you said, Bob, you were there in 1987, but very quickly, you could see this was a different kind of leader.
He was interested in democratization. I don't mean just petty markers along the way, but he wanted to open up a society through two great reforms at home. One, perestroika, the other glasnost. Perestroika restructuring was an attempt to open up a socialist market economy, but it was a very tough, tough move. Gorbachev really cared about glasnost, and opening up the kind of ... Ending the censorship, rolling back the censorship. He did care about moving to elections and parliaments, and I think for the first time in 1,000 years of Russian history, you did have the passage of executive power via election, and that too has been squandered.
What I think remains important and shouldn't be consigned to the foreign international field was this was the most committed, not just arms reductionist, but thinker about national security, thinker about abolition of nuclear weapons, understanding a different kind of common security, human security, and speaking out against the militarization of Europe from Russia, Vladivostok, to Lisbon, and Portugal, and seeking after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, that there'd be a peaceful, common European home.
In that context, he was horrified, as you are Bob, in these last years, as the arms race, as he put it, metastasized and it was a colossal loss of sanity as one arms control treaty ... Arms control, we're not talking disarmament, was rolled back. De-democratization, and I'll stop here, which many attribute to Putin, de-democratization of Russia is something Gorbachev looked at at his country and really understood that Boris Yeltsin, who was overly-acclaimed in this country, had presided over the looting of a country, a devastation, impoverishment of a country.
He and Yeltsin really disliked each other. Though I don't believe in men make history, you can argue that the liquidation of the Soviet Union, I don't call it the collapse, maybe the abolition, was contributed to by one man, a great reformer for change, and the other, someone who had a will to power, Boris Yeltsin, who would never have appeared if glasnost and perestroika had not been policies.
In any case, there was a triumphalism at the end of the Cold War, which Gorbachev and sane people in Europe and this country understood would take us back as we are now in not simply a cold war, but a hot war. In that context, Gorbachev regretted how the West, in a way, refused to ... To be triumphalist and not understand that we either all won with the end of the Cold War, not squandering trillions on weapons, or we all lost and we should find new ways to engage and live.
Robert Scheer:
Yeah. Hopefully, not blow up the world while we're trying to find a way. For people listening to this, we have a short view of history, and I want to assure people, if they have any doubt about the significance of Gorbachev's intentions, of his thinking, they should pick up his book, Perestroika, which I reviewed in The Moscow News, but I also reviewed for the Los Angeles Times, where I was working.
I reviewed it sitting in the old National Hotel, because I'd gotten a copy while I was in Moscow. I was blown away by that book then, back when I wrote that in '87, but I also was blown away rereading it after Gorbachev's death this week at the age, I believe, 91.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
That's right.
Robert Scheer:
I didn't know Gorbachev the way you did. You met with him, you talked with him-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Yes.
Robert Scheer:
... often, and you are a legitimate expert on Russian history.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
No, Yeah.
Robert Scheer:
Don't be modest on me now, and I am not. I've been in Russia a lot of. I first went there in the early '60s. I tried, but as many journalists, I parachuted in, I spent some time. In that case, I spent two months. You've lived your life, ever since your days at Princeton.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
That's right.
Robert Scheer:
You married a key expert, Steve Cohen. I mean, there's no one who could carry that guy's luggage intellectually, and wrote this very famous book on Bukharin, understood the complexity of what was going on. I want to make it clear to people, if you read what Gorbachev laid out for the world to read and his own people, he said the system had failed and could not just be patched up.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
That's right.
Robert Scheer:
The reason he pushed for glasnost, openness, was that the bureaucracy would smother anything less.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Any new ideas, yeah.
Robert Scheer:
So this was, the reason I want to do the interview, very rarely in human history do we get a leader of a powerful nation who has great power and can certainly ensure his survival for some time saying, "You know what? It's not working. We have to fundamentally change it." And what I'd like for you to do is talk about the reaction of the Russian people.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
All right, so let me just ...
Robert Scheer:
Many of them didn't like that, and he-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
I know.
Robert Scheer:
... became quite unpopular. Right?
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Of course he did at home, and there were reasons for it. There are big reasons. I will say, Bob, Perestroika is one of his many books, important book. We have a bookshelf of Gorbachev's writings, and he never deviated or veered from the idea of the importance of reform. He was not ... I mean, he is a radical in many ways, but he was a reformist. I want to just locate, for a moment, the end of the Soviet Union, as we were talking about. Steve, my late husband, went through many of what he called the questions of the century about why the Soviet Union ended. As I said, it has not been understood.
Gorbachev, and I've just been rereading his last speech to the Supreme Soviet in August, end of August 1991, after the coup. He fought hard to keep the Union together. He sought for a socialist democracy, a democratic socialism. He was, in so many fundamental ways, a social democrat. If you have one Communist Party, Bob, one party, we see it with the Democratic Party. I don't know what we see with the Republican right now, but there were people who emerged from that party, Gorbachev, Alexander Yakovlev.
Many of the people Steve and I interviewed in Voices of Glasnost: Interviews With Gorbachev's Reformers ... Because a great leader has a brain trust, and Gorbachev had a great brain trust, especially on international, and on glasnost issues. The economy, there were many debates, Bob, and you know this, about why didn't Mikhail Gorbachev begin as in China? You begin with the economy. You don't begin with political democracy, opening up a society.
It's a long story, but the roots of how those two countries were collectivized permitted China to begin with the economy. Russia was much more difficult because of the Stalinist collectivization program. There were attempts, they failed. There was anger on the part of people who were lining up, and then there was a bad anti-alcohol campaign.
I will say today, I sat at Novaya Gazeta, which is the independent called New Newspaper, which Gorbachev invested his Nobel Peace Prize money, much of it, in the future of this independent muckraking newspaper. The young journalists, 20s, young, early 20s, who are doing investigative reporting under great threat today, difficulties as in many countries, saw in Gorbachev, who sat at the table talking to them, someone who had allowed them to life a life and to lead a life they now did.
Let me just finish with the economy. Gorbachev found Steve's great biography, Bukharin, Nikolai Bukharin and political revolution ... Bukharin was killed in the purge trials, and the purges, Stalin's purges in 1938, but Bukharin offered an alternative, new economic program. Many countries today, smaller countries like Cuba or Vietnam, are looking for how to combine a market below like shoe repair, or restaurants, or small hotels, and the commanding heights, utilities, railroads are more nationalized as in parts of Europe. It was that model that has been suppressed.
It was in the '20s, and Gorbachev found that very important, and he read it before it was ever published in the West or in Russia, in Samizdat. The high polit had their own list of books they could get. He found in that book something of great value. He rehabilitated Bukharin in 1988 with the widow standing next to him. He always admired Steve for thinking about perestroika and in glasnost in ways that he did.
He was a humane man, and he wrote Bob, as you said, of course, this country took a number of years, you're right '87 was still early, to understand who Gorbachev was. There were some who did. I think George Shultz, George H.W., Reagan, in large measure, I think, to save his reputation, but there were many, many who did not. I mean, Al Haig thought he was Stalin in Gucci shoes for two years, three years. Steve went to Camp David before Malta, the Summit in 1989, and he was pitted against Richard Pipes, much more of a conservative, Polish immigrant who taught at Harvard.
The whole high command was there with George H.W. Bush, and Mr. Quayle. Steve, he understood it was probably preplanned, they'd made up their mind, but persuaded of Gorbachev's genuine interest in serious reform, a great reformer in a tormented country.
Robert Scheer:
Well, I would go further than that. I am sorry to single out Perestroika, but I think it was the book that really set the stage.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Okay.
Robert Scheer:
It raised a fundamental question, even in the book. Does the West really want to have peace with a government? Now you face it with China, even more than-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Absolutely.
Robert Scheer:
... with Putin's Russia. Can we abide a multipolar world? The great threat from China is not that they're going to conquer other countries. It's that they're going to out-produce us and become the number one economy. Maybe our currency will not be dominant, and so we are now vilifying China because they want to get into high-tech.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Yes.
Robert Scheer:
They want to make better ... They want to make cars, and high-end, and so they can pay their people more. Ironically, Richard Nixon, the American government made peace with a darkly communist China at the very time I was in there at the end of the Cultural Revolution, shortly before Nixon. It was a scary place, yet Nixon was able, and Kissinger, they were able to make peace that has lasted. Hopefully, it will last even through Biden, but we don't know now, because now we're not talking to them.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Bob, let me just say one thing about unipolarity versus multipolar. There was a moment at the end, after the Berlin Wall came down, and Gorbachev played an extraordinary role in Eastern Europe. He basically said to the leaders of East European countries, "You're independent now. I'm not taking Soviet troops out of the barracks."
This didn't happen by alchemy, but he really understood the need for engagement. More than engagement, for countries to work together, and instead at that moment, the United States said, "End of history. We're the winner. Triumphalism. We shall prevail." The damage that did is so extraordinary, it's part of the story. You're right. Today, and then what happened is you get Putin. Putin is welcomed by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The Nation worries about the authoritarian tendencies.
He's appointed by Yeltsin. The first act Putin makes is to give Yeltsin and his family immunity, but the great speech Putin gave, important speech in 1997, wasn't it, Bob? In Munich, at the Munich Security Conference, is essentially a plea for ending a unipolar world at the height of the debacle of Iraq. I think that has always been an important understanding, which the United States, to this day, in its national strategy documents, is calling Russia and China adversaries.
They are not friends. I mean, they're not even partners maybe, but to make them enemies shuts off the possibility of competing, say, economically with China, or holding our own load. I think we're going to see the division of Europe, which so many have said, "Well, look at the unity of Europe in the face of Russian aggression." I think that's dividing. Ironically, it's the division between old and new Europe that Mr. Rumsfeld casually played, but you're right, Bob. There is this sense, and it's not just China. It's the Global South. It's countries which are suffering from hunger and poverty as a result of this focus on this war, which needs to escalate toward some resolution, not toward more weapons.
Let me just say, I was in Moscow when the troops came back, the Russian Soviet troops from Afghanistan. That was not easy. It gets kind of put under the door, as we talk about Gorbachev, but there are Politburo notes which showed how much opposition he faced. That was a courageous decision. We have done a different way, and so I think that it's important to think of lessons Gorbachev brought us and add to our own, but I despair, I have to say.
I mean, I can't sit with humility and say I despair because Gorbachev imagined looking out at the world, and he was in a clinic in his last months, at the situation. He had Ukrainian relatives. His long-beloved wife who died in 1999, Raisa, was part Ukrainian. You look out and you must have questions about what you brought to the world and how it's been both misused and squandered, but he had questions about how he could have led differently. It never goes away. He was a-
Robert Scheer:
Did you talk to him about that?
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Yeah. I mean, he was horrified by ... He wasn't horrified, but in the last years ... He had hopes for Putin.
Robert Scheer:
When's the last time you saw him?
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
I saw him in 2018. He came to a number of birthday parties for Steve, which were held, it sounds odd, but in the cafeteria, the wonderful buffet of Novaya Gazeta, and he was there, and I had a chance to give him a copy of The Nation's 150, 150th. He sat, and he drank, and he would sing a little. He just was horrified by how things had been squandered.
He was also very affected, as people forget, by the coup of 1991, which propelled the centrifugal tendencies in Russia, Soviet Union, toward the end of ... It wasn't an empire, in my view. It was a multi-ethnic country, but it's worth knowing because there's been some sentimental coverage of how Gorbachev wanted to be buried next to his beloved wife, that his family, much of it lived in Germany. His daughter, granddaughters, great-grandchildren.
I think they were angered by how the country had treated their father, but Raisa Gorbacheva, during the coup, they were in Crimea, and she suffered a stroke. This is known. Because she worried that they would be treated like the Romanovs. She came back to Moscow. She never fully recovered, and though she died seven or eight years later, she never fully recovered, and I think that was always a weight on him. The coup plotters were the kind of ... They were the KGB, and the National Security Forces, and they were inept, but in the process, it did propel the end, and Yeltsin became the leader.
Robert Scheer:
Yeah. We found a communist we thought we could control. That was Yeltsin, who was no less-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
He misunderstood the power.
Robert Scheer:
Everybody talks about Putin, who was a low-level colonel, actually.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Absolutely. They ... Yeah.
Robert Scheer:
He's a product of the system, my god, what was Yeltsin? Yeltsin was right in there.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
No, no. He was in the Politburo.
Robert Scheer:
Yeah.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
No, I mean, listen, you debated in 1989. That's my memory, 1989, because you came back to Moscow a few times. You didn't debate. You had a conversation with Steve, and Claire Shipman, who was then a CNN reporter, about where Russia was heading. You, I think, met Yegor Ligachyov, who was considered the conservative ballast of the Politburo. Very good man.
Robert Scheer:
I met Alexander Yakovlev, who was the liberal-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
He was-
Robert Scheer:
... of the Politburo, and then he took me down the hall to Ligachyov, because he thought I was demonizing him. He said, "We have our differences, but this is not some monster," but Ligachyov was not the-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
You were right. I mean, Steve ... We got to know him. I think he's still alive.
Robert Scheer:
Yeah.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Steve wrote the introduction to his memoirs, which appeared in English. He was a conservative!
Robert Scheer:
Katrina, we're going to run out of time. I want to get back to the urgency of peace-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Yes, peace.
Robert Scheer:
... and complexity, and understanding of the societies. Whatever happened to Gorbachev, the fact of the matter is, the U.S. establishment was in a partying mood. They wanted humiliation. They didn't like Gorbachev's idea-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
No, they did not.
Robert Scheer:
... of being able to save the system. Ironically, Richard Nixon did. Richard Nixon-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Let me just say that I've been reading Gorbachev's, one of his memoirs he's written. He went to the airport with George H.W., and this when he was Vice President Bush. Bush explained to him, and Gorbachev kind of accepted it, that only under Reagan, who had called the Soviet Union the Evil Empire, and was tough as nails about any-
Robert Scheer:
Monsters. In my interview with Reagan, he said, "They are monsters, and they will destroy the world." He told me that, yeah.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Right. I mean, and even in 1985, at the first Summit in Geneva, in the fall of 1985, Gorbachev called Reagan a dinosaur, and I don't know, Reagan called him an old Bolshevik, so it's like the dinosaur and the Bolshevik, but they found a way to, for the larger purposes, they abolished an entire class, maybe two classes. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces, and the Conventional Force agreement, and they found a way Of course, the big moment very early on, and it was before Chernobyl, which was a terrible moment where you could see the suppression of voices and the bad information, but in Reykjavik in Iceland, Gorbachev really believed in the abolition of nuclear weapons, a position that Henry Kissinger and who is it? Shalikashvili and a few others have come to in different ways, but Reagan couldn't-
Robert Scheer:
So did Richard Nixon.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
So did Richard Nixon. Yeah, and Kissinger, but Reagan couldn't go that far, partly I think ... You've read Frankie FitzGerald's book. I mean, Reagan had delusions from Hollywood about SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative, which you've written all about, but here's the thing. Not many magazines have a peace correspondent. We did in Jonathan Schell who, no longer with us, who did a whole issue on abolition and interviewed Gorbachev, but we need to think of peace. Peace has become a subversive term. There are costs to not having peace, and I think ... I'm involved with something called the Quincy Institute, which is, you know, about engagement, dialog, and diplomacy.
Robert Scheer:
I know. I talked to the Colonel, Alexander Bacevich, or something, just yesterday.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Yeah.
Robert Scheer:
Yeah.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
The aversion, and always believing war is the very, very last resort. I think that, we haven't even mentioned the word, I don't think we did in NATO, Bob, but NATO, to this day it's hard to believe it's contested, even with the documents that show Gorbachev was basically stabbed in the back. He was reviled in Russia for many, many years for not having gotten a document, an agreement.
Okay, sure. Maybe you should have gotten an agreement, but you think some of these people, I won't name names, would abide by that agreement? It's very clear there was a promise on hold, not one inch eastward, which was not just upended, but kind of thrust in his face because they'd moved now to the borders of Russia.
Robert Scheer:
Let me say, I want to, because we're going to run out of time.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Okay.
Robert Scheer:
This is not basically about the Ukraine, although we could do another podcast on that, and you know a lot more, again, about that. There's a big idea I want to address here and that is, does the United States want peace? I'm talking about the United States as a culture, as a kind of political entity, despite our agreements. There's an establishment, seems to get frayed at the edge. This is basically a question raised by a writer who, certainly when he was writing this, had no sympathy for communism, George Orwell.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Yeah, I agree.
Robert Scheer:
He had no sympathy for totalitarian, authoritarian rule, and it was George Orwell who, piggybacking on his old French teacher, Aldous Huxley, developed a different model of totalitarianism. Huxley had the one of capitalist corruption, and consumerism, and drugs, and everything. Orwell said, "No." He thought that societies would become more authoritarian and do it in the brutal way of coercion. He said, however, it would be masked, and so forth, by security, and it would be justified by the hunt for an enemy. The challenge that Gorbachev puts down in that classic book, Perestroika, and I will go to my grave thinking it's one of the most important, not influential, but logically important works by any man of power, or woman of power, where he said, and this does get echoed later by Nixon and Kissinger, and certainly in the nuclear age, war is not an option.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Right.
Robert Scheer:
He said everything has to be done to understand that and put this ... We are now at a moment where people, in kind of a giddy fashion, are sticking their finger in the eye of the Russian bear, or in China, in the case of Taiwan. After all, it was Richard Nixon who accepted the idea that Taiwan's a part of China. We're not fighting about that anymore. Instead, now there's almost, what did we hear that from the head of our military units, Wester, was it? He said, "No, we have humiliation. We have to defeat them. We have to smash them." We got that from some of the European leaders, and so there's two questions I want to raise. One is whether the United States can live in peace, and particularly, when we no longer have the supreme confidence in our own economy, and we are being defeated, not in the battlefield but economically, and we saw it during the pandemic. We could not have survived without Amazon getting 90% of what we were buying from China, and then when they didn't get it from China, they get it from communist Vietnam, or some other place, and that's one big issue. Is the U.S. capable of, and why are we pushing war? Where is the peace movement? Why aren't we having negotiations? The other is, one of the ironies of this situation is that we are forcing a realignment between Russia and China, but not just Russia, China. If you look at the polling of Soros' institute, I think the Open Society, just The New York Times had a story about it today, that much of the world is rejecting the argument about the Ukraine.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
I agree, yeah. Let me just address very quickly, America has become comfortable with cold war. We've lived with endless wars, but we've lived with cold war.
Robert Scheer:
Drunk on it. Not comfortable, drunk.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Okay, but comfortable for many people, drunk for others. I do think that some of it has to do ... Generationally, you're a wise generation. I'm a medium generation, but a new generation has not grown up with leaders, with people in ... Well, there are people. I mean, I'm thinking of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, of Gorbachev, of Mandela, of those who have suffered violence and brutality. Gorbachev hated war, and he hated violence. That's not the case with many leaders who build themselves up through use of that. There has to be a new idea of how we remain secure. It's terrifying and tragic as we exit ... Who knows if we exit COVID, and pandemics, and all of the climate crisis, existential climate crisis, that we haven't found a way to rethink security. I think that's one of the most important issues on the way to peace and to upholding peace. Yes, we need a peace movement, but I'm stunned by going to gatherings where every issue except peace or finding a way to avoid a nuclear apocalypse is discussed. The linkage to money, look at the money we've been shipping into weapons and the ... I mean, it's a grotesque obscenity at this moment, the military industrial complex. They are literally so visible, the idea of a deep state is a joke. Russia and China. Why is it in 2022, we have ... I mean, the Ukraine peace needs to be a whole program, but why are we declaring these two countries, prior to the Ukrainian situation, great enemies, adversaries, hostile powers?
By the way, so I think we got people in this country who do believe in peace, whether it's ending guns in their communities, and militarized equipment coming in all the time. The linkages need to be made, and not in glib ways, but there is a question of peace. I would end by saying that Gorbachev, not religiously, but he was a heretic. He was a heretic who was willing to take on the nonconformist, the orthodox views. He was truly someone who could say, without flinching, and believed it, that if we don't try the unimaginable, we face the unthinkable, and there are not many leaders ...
He faced terrible opposition. I mean, the idea that it was all Gorbachev the leader, it's ridiculous. He couldn't get decrees fulfilled. He was refereeing between different groups, but he understood what he hoped not only his country, but the world could look like, and not in an arrogant way, which I think colors so much of what we hear these days. I'll end with one thing, which you've done very well, Bob. We live with a time of scrambled politics. The idea that Russia determined Trump's election, the collusion has diverted clear analysis of the real problems, dangers, challenges we face as a nation. I am sad to watch some of my liberal friends talk about intervention as an important event. They compare Ukraine to the Spanish Civil War. There's an article, just the other day, about how we liberals should be very proud of the side we're now on. I think that's not only a disgrace, but a danger to the world we could live in.
Robert Scheer:
First of all, this kind of talk is nuts. I mean-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
I know.
Robert Scheer:
... the people in this country and around the world who wanted to defeat fascism in Spain, defeat Franco, were communists. When they weren't communists, they were called communists. Come on.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
That's right. I know. I'm telling you, but-
Robert Scheer:
Red-baited beyond belief. The whole ... Look, we always want to find a logical-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
The enemy. We want to find an enemy to define us.
Robert Scheer:
Yeah, but it's never us.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Right.
Robert Scheer:
Right? It was never us. We're not allowed to say that because there's some intrinsic virtue to anything that our government-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
We do.
Robert Scheer:
... that our system does, but the fact of the matter is, we had a whole policy ... Forget about Russia for a moment. We had a whole policy of isolating China. You couldn't do any business with China. You couldn't get a loan with them.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
That's right.
Robert Scheer:
We're doing that again. We are, amazingly enough, trying to punish China because they've been good at capitalism.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Yeah.
Robert Scheer:
It's nuts. I have to use a word like that, okay? I was in the Center for Chinese Studies as a graduate student.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
That's right.
Robert Scheer:
I actually did go there during one of their worst times, maybe their worst time in modern history, certainly, the Cultural Revolution, so I understand the complexities, and I saw, but every war since World War II was fought to contain communism.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
I know.
Robert Scheer:
It all turned out to be wrong. Right now, we want Apple ... The New York Times has a story today, oh, Apple is being slow in getting out of China-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Jesus, yeah.
Robert Scheer:
... because China has now a lot of engineers, and supply, and blah, blah, blah. Where do they want them to go? They want them to go to communist Vietnam.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
I studied in college, what I studied was the McCarthy period. Can't draw complete parallels, and there were many factors, but the Vietnam War, in many ways, it's understanding those who presided and were architects of it, did not understand Vietnamese culture, politics, history, and you had people like John Service-
Robert Scheer:
Or Russian culture or Chinese culture.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
That's right.
Robert Scheer:
We don't understand anybody's culture.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
You had people like John Service, who was booted out of the State Department, or I forget which agency, because he was considered too pro-Chinese communist, and this goes on in different names and different-
Robert Scheer:
I'm going to end this, Katrina.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
All right, but we could go on forever, Bob.
Robert Scheer:
No, no, no, but I'm going to end it with pulling rank on you, not only as an old person, but somebody who was singled out as recently as Richard Nixon's presidency-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
You.
Robert Scheer:
... when I was editing Ramparts, and I had all kinds of, you can get the files, and was observed, and terrible things, but I also had the pleasure of talking to Richard Nixon in his time of retirement and disgrace, when he'd written a number of books about the importance of peace.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Yep. Oh, that's interesting.
Robert Scheer:
One thing you have to say about the older, quote, conservatives and warmongers, and they were then, they had a sense of limits and costs, and I would say, as somebody who spent quite a bit of time talking to Ronald Reagan, even before he was governor here in California, again, when he said, "The problem is these people are monsters." When he discovered that Gorbachev was not a monster, Reagan was very open to getting rid of nuclear weapons. What you have now is a memory loss.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
It's what your good friend, my good friend, Gore Vidal, used to call the U.S. of amnesia. There is an amnesia beyond a history loss that doesn't permit an understanding, because there's so much condemnation so quickly of people you're talking about, or ideas that could be retrieved. I think that's important, and there is a kind of lockdown on the kind of history permitted. I'm not talking critical race theory or the madness of DeSantis. I'm just talking generally, what you're not permitted to touch if you're-
Robert Scheer:
You're not permitted to challenge America-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Orthodoxy.
Robert Scheer:
Virtue. America makes mistakes, but America never does wrong, so it all started, maybe we should remember, it started with dropping ... We talk about terrorism. It started with dropping-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
I know, the bombs.
Robert Scheer:
Deliberate bombing of civilians in two, basically, nonmilitary seaport cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I mean, it's crazy.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Bob, I'm going to take rank as nothing, but just to say you should do a set of podcasts in mid to late October about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the lessons. Martin Sherwin wrote a brilliant book, Gambling to Armageddon, about the good fortune we've had, I think, as McNamara said, to escape nuclear annihilation.
Robert Scheer:
Right.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
If we're still here, you should do all of the great work you've done.
Robert Scheer:
It was whenever we had a Democratic president. It's something I have to remind the editor of The Nation, and I'll close on this. I'll probably be condemned to an eternity in hell telling the editor of The Nation she should look to Richard Nixon for an example.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
No, no, listen, I've become a realist, a progressive, I hope, humane realist. I don't have a lot of sympathy for liberal interventions. I will say, there was an event at The Century Foundation here in New York a few years ago, and it was a whippersnapper, young, all these guys around a table, and it was, "How do we get out of Iraq?" Everyone had their eight-part partition plan, until they got to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Ted Sorensen, who said, "Get out." I guess, lesson learned.
Robert Scheer:
Well, or talk to the other side.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
I know.
Robert Scheer:
I mean, if Richard Nixon could talk to Mao Tse Tung, why, if you suggest on this program, sit down with Putin and-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Bob, the failure of ... It's too stodgy a word, but talking, just back channels, diplomacy, it's like people are proud that they haven't talked to someone they need to talk to to resolve a conflict. I mean, that is a measure of madness, in my mind, because you have to find-
Robert Scheer:
Well, actually, it's happened. I mean, look at, Roosevelt talked to Stalin. Eisenhower talked to Khrushchev.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
I know, I know.
Robert Scheer:
What is this? Suddenly, it's a-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
It's suddenly dangerous, like you'll be-
Robert Scheer:
That's right.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
... infected or, I don't ...
Robert Scheer:
Yeah. All right, well-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
I think we need ... All right. We've resolved all the problems of the world. I'm going-
Robert Scheer:
Maybe we'll do part two, but I must say-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
By the way, this is the biggest story. I mean, it's big because it includes the entire world, and the story you cited today about the Global South and how countries are looking. This is just, it needs to find a way, I mean this, but to resolve Ukrainian sovereignty, and independence, but the longer this war goes on ... Just look at Afghanistan, how good we are at reconstruction and assisting countries with new leaders.
Robert Scheer:
Now we have the idea that once they cross that border-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
I know.
Robert Scheer:
... because their claim, "Oh, they were going to overthrow a government." What did we do in Iraq? What did we do in Afghanistan? What did we do in Vietnam? We've been the major ... As Martin Luther King said, the major purveyor of violence in the world today. Martin Luther King said that. Yet, we now act ... Finally, we have our Vietnam. "Oh, we got Putin there and he goes after white people in a civilized country," and blah, blah, blah. There's no complexity. There's no idea of possible negotiation.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
You know what? I'm going to end simply by saying, we should continue this. I would value it, but embrace complexity.
Robert Scheer:
Great.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
We have lost some of that. I mean, it's not the answer fully, but it is a measure of kind of ...
Robert Scheer:
I will.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
You do every day, to excess.
Robert Scheer:
I should, by the way, point out that I am a contributing editor to The Nation. Not that anybody-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
An extraordinary-
Robert Scheer:
... there has ever listened to me, but I-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
No, that's not ... No, no.
Robert Scheer:
I'm only kidding.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
You've done some extraordinary ... From Clinton and welfare deform to Wen Ho Lee.
Robert Scheer:
Yeah, and I've known you forever. I was a close friend of your late mother, who I much admire, and I've got some support for this-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Someone is doing a podcast about her. They're going to be in touch with you, Bob.
Robert Scheer:
Okay.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Anyway-
Robert Scheer:
Well, thank you-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
What you're going into is a very separate show, which ... All right.
Robert Scheer:
All right. Let me just, I just want to thank the people at KCRW for-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Thank you.
Robert Scheer:
... posting these podcasts. Christopher Ho, and Laura Kondourajian, Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, Natasha Hakimi Zapata, who writes for The Nation is also-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Absolutely.
Robert Scheer:
... does the introduction to these.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Award-winning journalist, yeah.
Robert Scheer:
And the JKW Foundation, which in the memory of your mother, Jean Stein, a writer I had great respect for. I want to thank you for support, and that's it for this issue of-
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Thank you, and thank you to your team.
Robert Scheer:
... Scheer Intelligence.
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Gorbachev Rode the Tiger and Ended Up Inside It
The late Soviet leader ended the Cold War, but his botched reforms opened the way to Russia’s modern crony capitalism.
Sep 02, 2022
So what are we to say about Mikhail Gorbachev, who passed away on August 30?
For one, the late Soviet leader triggered a process of socialist reform that ran out of control and ended up with Soviet socialism swept away. Under his successor, the drunken Boris Yeltsin, the West, and the International Monetary Fund were given a free hand to bring about the birth of capitalism in Russia.
Progressives would probably say the Soviet system needed reform, but Gorbachev botched it and paved the way for Putin's authoritarian and crony capitalist rule
This destructive process of sweeping away all the institutions of state socialism via radical privatization did not give birth to the free market capitalism that the ideologues of the IMF and their Russian acolytes desired. Instead, it gave way to a system where privatized assets passed into a few hands that had mastered the system of pirate capitalism.
So great was the pain, both physical and psychological, inflicted on the Russian people that when a "savior" from unbridled capitalism emerged from the ranks of the former KGB, the Soviet security agency, they embraced him. So associated in the Russian consciousness was the chaotic liberal democracy under Yeltsin with the economic shock therapy imposed by the West that they've tolerated Putin's two decades of authoritarianism cum crony capitalism as a lesser evil.
The Chinese said Gorbachev's lessons boiled down to three: 1) never trust the West; 2) reform the economy and allow the development of private enterprise, but keep the state in a leading role; and 3) make sure the Communist Party has a firm hold of the political process.
Now one may quarrel with one, two, or all three of these propositions, but it is hard to deny the results of this approach: the emergence of China as the world's second biggest economy, the reduction of poverty to less than 5 percent of the Chinese population, and a political system that is both stable and broadly considered legitimate within the country.
To be sure, there are problems that many point to, like environmental crises and lack of democratic participation, but the ordinary Chinese would probably respond: "Sure, we have many problems, but would we exchange this system for that of the United States? Of course not."
The U.S. infrastructure and economy overall are in such a decrepit state that some Americans say all it takes to convince an American to realize that the Chinese system is superior is to take the high speed train that travels the 819 miles from Shanghai to Beijing in just 4.5 hours. (Amtrak, by contrast, covers the 457 miles from Boston to Washington, D.C. in 7 hours--and it ain't no point-to-point train!)
But back to Gorbachev. How should he be judged?
Certainly to the Western elite, he was and is a hero since he helped eliminate a major rival to capitalism. Progressives would probably say the Soviet system needed reform, but Gorbachev botched it and paved the way for Putin's authoritarian and crony capitalist rule. And the Chinese would probably say he's important as an example of how not to manage an economy and political system.
And what do I say?
I think Gorbachev was naive in his dealings with Ronald Reagan and the West, who were not interested in Soviet reform but in bringing down the Soviet Union. But being a product of the Soviet system, he realized that he was unleashing a process in a complex system of control dominated by the gargantuan Soviet Communist Party that could only have unpredictable consequences.
Gorbachev knew he was riding the tiger. And while I may have had disagreements with some of his policies, I've always respected people who don't fear to ride tigers even when they know they might end up in them, as Gorbachev did.
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Mikhail Gorbachev, Who Presided Over End of Cold War and Soviet Empire, Dead at 91
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said Gorbachev "did more than any other individual to bring about the peaceful end of the Cold War."
Aug 30, 2022
Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet president whose gradual opening of his country paved the way for both the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the communist empire, died Tuesday at age 91.
"We could only solve our problems by cooperating with other countries... And therefore we needed to put an end to the Iron Curtain."
Gorbachev died following a "serious and long illness," officials at Moscow Central Clinical Hospital told Russian state media.
In a statement, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was "deeply saddened" to learn of Gorbachev's passing, calling the former Soviet leader "a one-of-a kind statesman who changed the course of history."
"He did more than any other individual to bring about the peaceful end of the Cold War," Guterres added. "Receiving the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, he observed that 'peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity.' He put this vital insight into practice by pursuing the path of negotiation, reform, transparency, and disarmament."
Following the deaths of three Soviet leaders in just over two years, Gorbachev took control of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in March 1985 amid a moribund national economy and heightened Cold War tensions with the United States, then led by the ardently imperialist Reagan administration.
In an attempt to address his country's economic woes, Gorbachev implemented the policy of perestroika, or "restructuring," which sought to improve efficiency by decentralizing decision-making. He also ushered in the age of glasnost, or "openness," allowing for erstwhile unimaginable freedoms in what had for generations been a rigidly totalitarian state. Both of Gorbachev's grandfathers were imprisoned in gulags during the Stalinist repression of his youth, and he and his family also survived the 1932-33 engineered famine that killed millions in Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union.
Despite then-President Ronald Reagan condemning the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and U.S. nuclear aggression epitomized by the placement of new nuclear missiles in Europe and research into the so-called "Star Wars" space-based missile defense system, Gorbachev chose to pursue a policy of rapprochement with the United States. This led to a series of bilateral summits between the two leaders that bore fruits in the form of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed in December 1987.
Gorbachev also presided over the pullout of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, a costly war lasting nearly a decade that ended the same way every invasion of Afghanistan over the past 200 years has ended--in defeated withdrawal.
More importantly, Gorbachev--unlike his predecessors--did not intervene militarily when Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe began asserting their independence from Moscow, culminating in the dramatic destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that effectively marked the end of the Cold War.
He later explained: "On the day I became Soviet leader, in March 1985, I had a special meeting with the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries and told them, 'You are independent, and we are independent. You are responsible for your policies, we are responsible for ours. We will not intervene in your affairs, I promise you.'"
In the end, the rot within the Soviet Union and the forces Gorbachev unleashed by opening its society proved too much and the once-mighty empire came crashing down in 1991. Many Russians blame Gorbachev for the loss of the power and prestige that came with being one of the world's two superpowers, and some observers view Russian President Vladimir Putin's aggressive policies and actions as an effort to regain lost Soviet glory--and territory.
By the time Gorbachev stepped down as the last Soviet leader on Christmas day 1991, relations with the West had been so thoroughly transformed that the USSR--which regularly used its veto power as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council to thwart U.S. ambitions--voted in favor of the resolution authorizing the invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
"We could only solve our problems by cooperating with other countries. It would have been paradoxical not to cooperate," Gorbachev said of his policies. "And therefore we needed to put an end to the Iron Curtain, to change the nature of international relations, to rid them of ideological confrontation, and particularly to end the arms race."
The U.S. has been accused of running roughshod over Gorbachev's goodwill gestures during the post-Soviet era, especially by expanding NATO to Russia's borders by admitting former Warsaw Pact members into the alliance.
Contrary to popular belief, Gorbachev said he never made any agreement with James Baker, Reagan's secretary of state, to end the Cold War in exchange for a promise to not expand NATO.
"The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all, and it wasn't brought up in those years," Gorbachev said in 2014. "Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO's military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-[East Germany] after German reunification."
Last December, as Putin cited NATO provocation while preparing to invade Ukraine, Gorbachev accused the United States of growing "arrogant and self-confident" following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"How can one count on equal relations with the United States and the West in such a position?" he asked.
"Americans have a severe disease--worse than AIDS," Gorbachev said earlier. "It's called the winner's complex."
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Diplomacy Ruled Out in Ukraine War
How George Orwell's doublethink became the way of the world.
Jun 19, 2022
David Barsamian: Let's head into the most obvious nightmare of this moment, the war in Ukraine and its effects globally. But first a little background. Let's start with President George H.W. Bush's assurance to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move "one inch to the east"--and that pledge has been verified. My question to you is, why didn't Gorbachev get that in writing?
If you imagine some extraterrestrials, if they existed, they'd think we were all totally insane. And they'd be right.
Noam Chomsky: He accepted a gentleman's agreement, which is not that uncommon in diplomacy. Shake-of-the-hand. Furthermore, having it on paper would have made no difference whatsoever. Treaties that are on paper are torn up all the time. What matters is good faith. And in fact, H.W. Bush, the first Bush, did honor the agreement explicitly. He even moved toward instituting a partnership in peace, which would accommodate the countries of Eurasia. NATO wouldn't be disbanded but would be marginalized. Countries like Tajikistan, for example, could join without formally being part of NATO. And Gorbachev approved of that. It would have been a step toward creating what he called a common European home with no military alliances.
Clinton in his first couple of years also adhered to it. What the specialists say is that by about 1994, Clinton started to, as they put it, talk from both sides of his mouth. To the Russians he was saying: Yes, we're going to adhere to the agreement. To the Polish community in the United States and other ethnic minorities, he was saying: Don't worry, we'll incorporate you within NATO. By about 1996-97, Clinton said this pretty explicitly to his friend Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whom he had helped win the 1996 election. He told Yeltsin: Don't push too hard on this NATO business. We're going to expand but I need it because of the ethnic vote in the United States.
In 1997, Clinton invited the so-called Visegrad countries--Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania--to join NATO. The Russians didn't like it but didn't make much of a fuss. Then the Baltic nations joined, again the same thing. In 2008, the second Bush, who was quite different from the first, invited Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. Every U.S. diplomat understood very well that Georgia and Ukraine were red lines for Russia. They'll tolerate the expansion elsewhere, but these are in their geostrategic heartland and they're not going to tolerate expansion there. To continue with the story, the Maidan uprising took place in 2014, expelling the pro-Russian president and Ukraine moved toward the West.
From 2014, the U.S. and NATO began to pour arms into Ukraine--advanced weapons, military training, joint military exercises, moves to integrate Ukraine into the NATO military command. There's no secret about this. It was quite open. Recently, the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, bragged about it. He said: This is what we were doing since 2014. Well, of course, this is very consciously, highly provocative. They knew that they were encroaching on what every Russian leader regarded as an intolerable move. France and Germany vetoed it in 2008, but under U.S. pressure, it was kept on the agenda. And NATO, meaning the United States, moved to accelerate the de facto integration of Ukraine into the NATO military command.
In 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming majority--I think about 70% of the vote--on a peace platform, a plan to implement peace with Eastern Ukraine and Russia, to settle the problem. He began to move forward on it and, in fact, tried to go to the Donbas, the Russian-oriented eastern region, to implement what's called the Minsk II agreement. It would have meant a kind of federalization of Ukraine with a degree of autonomy for the Donbas, which is what they wanted. Something like Switzerland or Belgium. He was blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if he persisted with his effort.
Well, he's a courageous man. He could have gone forward if he had had any backing from the United States. The U.S. refused. No backing, nothing, which meant he was left to hang out to dry and had to back off. The U.S. was intent on this policy of integrating Ukraine step by step into the NATO military command. That accelerated further when President Biden was elected. In September 2021, you could read it on the White House website. It wasn't reported but, of course, the Russians knew it. Biden announced a program, a joint statement to accelerate the process of military training, military exercises, more weapons as part of what his administration called an "enhanced program" of preparation for NATO membership.
It accelerated further in November. This was all before the invasion. Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed what was called a charter, which essentially formalized and extended this arrangement. A spokesman for the State Department conceded that before the invasion, the U.S. refused to discuss any Russian security concerns. All of this is part of the background.
On February 24th, Putin invaded, a criminal invasion. These serious provocations provide no justification for it. If Putin had been a statesman, what he would have done is something quite different. He would have gone back to French President Emmanuel Macron, grasped his tentative proposals, and moved to try to reach an accommodation with Europe, to take steps toward a European common home.
The U.S., of course, has always been opposed to that. This goes way back in Cold War history to French President de Gaulle's initiatives to establish an independent Europe. In his phrase "from the Atlantic to the Urals," integrating Russia with the West, which was a very natural accommodation for trade reasons and, obviously, security reasons as well. So, had there been any statesmen within Putin's narrow circle, they would have grasped Macron's initiatives and experimented to see whether, in fact, they could integrate with Europe and avert the crisis. Instead, what he chose was a policy which, from the Russian point of view, was total imbecility. Apart from the criminality of the invasion, he chose a policy that drove Europe deep into the pocket of the United States. In fact, it is even inducing Sweden and Finland to join NATO--the worst possible outcome from the Russian point of view, quite apart from the criminality of the invasion, and the very serious losses that Russia is suffering because of that.
So, criminality and stupidity on the Kremlin side, severe provocation on the U.S. side. That's the background that has led to this. Can we try to bring this horror to an end? Or should we try to perpetuate it? Those are the choices.
There's only one way to bring it to an end. That's diplomacy. Now, diplomacy, by definition, means both sides accept it. They don't like it, but they accept it as the least bad option. It would offer Putin some kind of escape hatch. That's one possibility. The other is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we'll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a livable human existence. Those are the options. Well, with near 100% unanimity, the United States and most of Europe want to pick the no-diplomacy option. It's explicit. We have to keep going to hurt Russia.
You can read columns in the New York Times, the London Financial Times, all over Europe. A common refrain is: we've got to make sure that Russia suffers. It doesn't matter what happens to Ukraine or anyone else. Of course, this gamble assumes that if Putin is pushed to the limit, with no escape, forced to admit defeat, he'll accept that and not use the weapons he has to devastate Ukraine.
There are a lot of things that Russia hasn't done. Western analysts are rather surprised by it. Namely, they've not attacked the supply lines from Poland that are pouring weapons into Ukraine. They certainly could do it. That would very soon bring them into direct confrontation with NATO, meaning the U.S. Where it goes from there, you can guess. Anyone who's ever looked at war games knows where it'll go--up the escalatory ladder toward terminal nuclear war.
So, those are the games we're playing with the lives of Ukrainians, Asians, and Africans, the future of civilization, in order to weaken Russia, to make sure that they suffer enough. Well, if you want to play that game, be honest about it. There's no moral basis for it. In fact, it's morally horrendous. And the people who are standing on a high horse about how we're upholding principle are moral imbeciles when you think about what's involved.
Barsamian: In the media, and among the political class in the United States, and probably in Europe, there's much moral outrage about Russian barbarity, war crimes, and atrocities. No doubt they are occurring as they do in every war. Don't you find that moral outrage a bit selective though?
Chomsky: The moral outrage is quite in place. There should be moral outrage. But you go to the Global South, they just can't believe what they're seeing. They condemn the war, of course. It's a deplorable crime of aggression. Then they look at the West and say: What are you guys talking about? This is what you do to us all the time.
It's kind of astonishing to see the difference in commentary. So, you read the New York Times and their big thinker, Thomas Friedman. He wrote a column a couple of weeks ago in which he just threw up his hands in despair. He said: What can we do? How can we live in a world that has a war criminal? We've never experienced this since Hitler. There's a war criminal in Russia. We're at a loss as to how to act. We've never imagined the idea that there could be a war criminal anywhere.
When people in the Global South hear this, they don't know whether to crack up in laughter or ridicule. We have war criminals walking all over Washington. Actually, we know how to deal with our war criminals. In fact, it happened on the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. Remember, this was an entirely unprovoked invasion, strongly opposed by world opinion. There was an interview with the perpetrator, George W. Bush, who then went on to invade Iraq, a major war criminal, in the style section of the Washington Post--an interview with, as they described it, this lovable goofy grandpa who was playing with his grandchildren, making jokes, showing off the portraits he painted of famous people he'd met. Just a beautiful, friendly environment.
So, we know how to deal with war criminals. Thomas Friedman is wrong. We deal with them very well.
Or take probably the major war criminal of the modern period, Henry Kissinger. We deal with him not only politely, but with great admiration. This is the man after all who transmitted the order to the Air Force, saying that there should be massive bombing of Cambodia--"anything that flies on anything that moves" was his phrase. I don't know of a comparable example in the archival record of a call for mass genocide. And it was implemented with very intensive bombing of Cambodia. We don't know much about it because we don't investigate our own crimes. But Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, serious historians of Cambodia, have described it. Then there's our role in overthrowing Salvador Allende's government in Chile and instituting a vicious dictatorship there, and on and on. So, we do know how to deal with our war criminals.
Still, Thomas Friedman can't imagine that there's anything like Ukraine. Nor was there any commentary on what he wrote, which means it was regarded as quite reasonable. You can hardly use the word selectivity. It's beyond astonishing. So, yes, the moral outrage is perfectly in place. It's good that Americans are finally beginning to show some outrage about major war crimes committed by someone else.
Barsamian: I've got a little puzzle for you. It's in two parts. Russia's military is inept and incompetent. Its soldiers have very low morale and are poorly led. Its economy ranks with Italy's and Spain's. That's one part. The other part is Russia is a military colossus that threatens to overwhelm us. So, we need more weapons. Let's expand NATO. How do you reconcile those two contradictory thoughts?
Chomsky: Those two thoughts are standard in the entire West. I just had a long interview in Sweden about their plans to join NATO. I pointed out that Swedish leaders have two contradictory ideas, the two you mentioned. One, gloating over the fact that Russia has proven itself to be a paper tiger that can't conquer cities a couple of miles from its border defended by a mostly citizens' army. So, they're completely militarily incompetent. The other thought is: they're poised to conquer the West and destroy us.
George Orwell had a name for that. He called it doublethink, the capacity to have two contradictory ideas in your mind and believe both of them. Orwell mistakenly thought that was something you could only have in the ultra-totalitarian state he was satirizing in 1984. He was wrong. You can have it in free democratic societies. We're seeing a dramatic example of it right now. Incidentally, this is not the first time.
Such doublethink is, for instance, characteristic of Cold War thinking. You go way back to the major Cold War document of those years, NSC-68 in 1950. Look at it carefully and it showed that Europe alone, quite apart from the United States, was militarily on a par with Russia. But of course, we still had to have a huge rearmament program to counter the Kremlin design for world conquest.
That's one document and it was a conscious approach. Dean Acheson, one of the authors, later said that it's necessary to be "clearer than truth," his phrase, in order to bludgeon the mass mind of government. We want to drive through this huge military budget, so we have to be "clearer than truth" by concocting a slave state that's about to conquer the world. Such thinking runs right through the Cold War. I could give you many other examples, but we're seeing it again now quite dramatically. And the way you put it is exactly correct: these two ideas are consuming the West.
Barsamian: It's also interesting that diplomat George Kennan foresaw the danger of NATO moving its borders east in a very prescient op-ed he wrote that appeared in The New York Times in 1997.
Chomsky: Kennan had also been opposed to NSC-68. In fact, he had been the director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff. He was kicked out and replaced by Paul Nitze. He was regarded as too soft for such a hard world. He was a hawk, radically anticommunist, pretty brutal himself with regard to U.S. positions, but he realized that military confrontation with Russia made no sense.
Russia, he thought, would ultimately collapse from internal contradictions, which turned out to be correct. But he was considered a dove all the way through. In 1952, he was in favor of the unification of Germany outside the NATO military alliance. That was actually Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin's proposal as well. Kennan was ambassador to the Soviet Union and a Russia specialist.
Stalin's initiative. Kennan's proposal. Some Europeans supported it. It would have ended the Cold War. It would have meant a neutralized Germany, non-militarized and not part of any military bloc. It was almost totally ignored in Washington.
There was one foreign policy specialist, a respected one, James Warburg, who wrote a book about it. It's worth reading. It's called Germany: Key to Peace. In it, he urged that this idea be taken seriously. He was disregarded, ignored, ridiculed. I mentioned it a couple of times and was ridiculed as a lunatic, too. How could you believe Stalin? Well, the archives came out. Turns out he was apparently serious. You now read the leading Cold War historians, people like Melvin Leffler, and they recognize that there was a real opportunity for a peaceful settlement at the time, which was dismissed in favor of militarization, of a huge expansion of the military budget.
Now, let's go to the Kennedy administration. When John Kennedy came into office, Nikita Khrushchev, leading Russia at the time, made a very important offer to carry out large-scale mutual reductions in offensive military weapons, which would have meant a sharp relaxation of tensions. The United States was far ahead militarily then. Khrushchev wanted to move toward economic development in Russia and understood that this was impossible in the context of a military confrontation with a far richer adversary. So, he first made that offer to President Dwight Eisenhower, who paid no attention. It was then offered to Kennedy and his administration responded with the largest peacetime buildup of military force in history--even though they knew that the United States was already far ahead.
The U.S. concocted a "missile gap." Russia was about to overwhelm us with its advantage in missiles. Well, when the missile gap was exposed, it turned out to be in favor of the U.S. Russia had maybe four missiles exposed on an airbase somewhere.
You can go on and on like this. The security of the population is simply not a concern for policymakers. Security for the privileged, the rich, the corporate sector, arms manufacturers, yes, but not the rest of us. This doublethink is constant, sometimes conscious, sometimes not. It's just what Orwell described, hyper-totalitarianism in a free society.
Barsamian: In an article in Truthout, you quote Eisenhower's 1953 "Cross of Iron" speech. What did you find of interest there?
Chomsky: You should read it and you'll see why it's interesting. It's the best speech he ever made. This was 1953 when he was just taking office. Basically, what he pointed out was that militarization was a tremendous attack on our own society. He--or whoever wrote the speech--put it pretty eloquently. One jet plane means this many fewer schools and hospitals. Every time we're building up our military budget, we're attacking ourselves.
He spelled it out in some detail, calling for a decline in the military budget. He had a pretty awful record himself, but in this respect he was right on target. And those words should be emblazoned in everyone's memory. Recently, in fact, Biden proposed a huge military budget. Congress expanded it even beyond his wishes, which represents a major attack on our society, exactly as Eisenhower explained so many years ago.
The excuse: the claim that we have to defend ourselves from this paper tiger, so militarily incompetent it can't move a couple of miles beyond its border without collapse. So, with a monstrous military budget, we have to severely harm ourselves and endanger the world, wasting enormous resources that will be necessary if we're going to deal with the severe existential crises we face. Meanwhile, we pour taxpayer funds into the pockets of the fossil-fuel producers so that they can continue to destroy the world as quickly as possible. That's what we're witnessing with the vast expansion of both fossil-fuel production and military expenditures. There are people who are happy about this. Go to the executive offices of Lockheed Martin, ExxonMobil, they're ecstatic. It's a bonanza for them. They're even being given credit for it. Now, they're being lauded for saving civilization by destroying the possibility for life on Earth. Forget the Global South. If you imagine some extraterrestrials, if they existed, they'd think we were all totally insane. And they'd be right.
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'No Winners in a Nuclear War': US, Russia, China, UK, and France Issue Rare Joint Statement
However, disarmament campaigners noted that the five nations are "expanding nuclear arsenals, spending billions on modernizing, and constantly prepared to start a nuclear war."
Jan 03, 2022
As the leaders of five of the world's nine nuclear powers on Monday released a rare joint statement acknowledging that there can be no victors of a nuclear war, disarmament campaigners called on them to "walk the talk" and pursue meaningful action to reduce the risk of thermonuclear armageddon by reducing--and ultimately eliminating--their own atomic stockpiles.
"As Greta Thunberg said, 'blah, blah, blah.' They write this 'nice' statement but [are] doing exactly the opposite in reality."
In a verbatim repetition of a historic 1985 proclamation by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, the leaders of the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France--the five permanent United Nations Security Council members, or P5--affirmed that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."
"As nuclear use would have far-reaching consequences, we also affirm that nuclear weapons--for as long as they continue to exist--should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war," the statement continued. "We believe strongly that the further spread of such weapons must be prevented."
None of the five countries, nor any of the other four nuclear powers, signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW)--a landmark 2017 agreement outlawing nukes that took effect last January and has been ratified by 56 nations.
Peace advocates reacted to the leaders' statement by noting the yawning chasm between their words and actions.
"As Greta Thunberg said, 'blah, blah, blah,'" Beatrice Fihn, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, tweeted in response to the leaders' proclamation. "They write this 'nice' statement but [are] doing exactly the opposite in reality. They're in a nuclear arms race, expanding nuclear arsenals, spending billions on modernizing, and constantly prepared to start a nuclear war."
The mission of Peru--which ratified the TPNW late last month--to the European Union said Monday that "it is important that all our countries advance together to a nuclear-weapon-free world by prohibiting their use!"
Darryl G. Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association (ACA), called the leaders' new declaration a "welcome respite from the usual bickering amongst the NPT's five nuclear-armed states," a reference to the landmark 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), to which all five statement signatories are party.
"But it is important to keep this in perspective since there is less here than meets the eye," Kimball said, noting that Reagan and Gorbachev issued a nearly identical proclamation four decades ago.
Allen Hester, the legislative representative for nuclear disarmament and Pentagon spending at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker advocacy group, called on the United States to renounce its first-strike nuclear doctrine.
"If the P5 can all agree that nuclear war can't be won and should never be fought, a no first use policy is a logical next step," he tweeted. "We need policies that match the (positive) rhetoric if the U.S is going to lead on reducing nuclear risk."
In the United States--the only country to have ever waged nuclear warfare--the ACA last year lamented that the administration of President Joe Biden has continued "every part of the unnecessary and unsustainable nuclear weapons spending plans it inherited from the Trump administration," including an expansion of Obama-era programs such as "more usable lower-yield nuclear capabilities."
"If the P5 can all agree that nuclear war can't be won and should never be fought, a no first use policy is a logical next step."
Meanwhile, the ACA says that China has endeavored to increase its nuclear arsenal from around 350 to 700 warheads by 2027, and 1,000 by the end of the decade.
Russia--which, with over 6,000 warheads, is home to the world's largest nuclear arsenal--is modernizing its missile delivery systems while developing two new types of intercontinental ballistic missiles, including the road-mobile RS-26 Rubezh, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service.
In a move that disarmament campaigners called a violation of Britain's NPT obligations, Prime Minister Boris Johnson last year announced a plan to increase the size of the nation's nuclear arsenal by up to 40%.
"The problem," said Kimball of the five statement leaders, "is that each advances deterrence strategies that depend on making the threat of use of nukes 'credible' and possible," adding that they "must walk the talk."
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'We Need a People's Vaccine': Ex-World Leaders, Nobel Laureates Urge Biden to Back WTO Waiver
"Supporting the emergency waiver of Covid-19-related intellectual property rules will give people around the globe a chance to wake up to a world free from the virus."
Apr 14, 2021
Calling on U.S. President Joe Biden to prioritize human need over corporate greed, more than 170 Nobel laureates and former heads of state and government on Wednesday sent an open letter urging him to back a waiver of intellectual property rules so that developing nations can ramp up coronavirus vaccine production and pursue a people's vaccine to help end a pandemic that has now claimed nearly three million lives.
"We will not end today's global pandemic until rich countries--most especially the United States--stop blocking the ability of countries around the world to mass produce safe and effective vaccines."
--Francoise Barre-Sinoussi,
Nobel laureate
Signers of the People's Vaccine Alliance letter--who include former Irish President Mary Robinson, former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as Nobel laureates including Joseph Stiglitz, Mairead Maguire, and Jody Williams--say they are "gravely concerned by the very slow progress in scaling up global Covid-19 vaccine access and inoculation in low- and middle-income countries."
"The world saw unprecedented development of safe and effective vaccines, in major part thanks to U.S. public investment," the letter states. "We all welcome that vaccination rollout in the U.S. and many wealthier countries is bringing hope to their citizens. Yet for the majority of the world that same hope is yet to be seen. New waves of suffering are now rising across the globe. Our global economy cannot rebuild if it remains vulnerable to this virus."
The letter continues:
But we are encouraged by news that your administration is considering a temporary waiver of World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property rules during the Covid-19 pandemic, as proposed by South Africa and India, and supported by more than 100 WTO member states and numerous health experts worldwide. A WTO waiver is a vital and necessary step to bringing an end to this pandemic. It must be combined with ensuring vaccine know-how and technology is shared openly.
This can be achieved through the World Health Organization Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, as your chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has called for. This will save lives and advance us towards global herd immunity. These actions would expand global manufacturing capacity, unhindered by industry monopolies that are driving the dire supply shortages blocking vaccine access.
Nine in 10 people in most poor countries may well go without a vaccine this year. At this pace, many nations will be left waiting until at least 2024 to achieve mass Covid-19 immunization, despite what the limited, while welcome, COVAX initiative is able to offer.
"With your leadership, we can ensure Covid-19 vaccine technology is shared with the world," the letter to Biden concludes. "Supporting the emergency waiver of Covid-19-related intellectual property rules will give people around the globe a chance to wake up to a world free from the virus. We need a people's vaccine."
Letter signatory Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for co-discovering the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), said in a statement that "we will not end today's global pandemic until rich countries--most especially the United States--stop blocking the ability of countries around the world to mass produce safe and effective vaccines."
"Big pharmaceutical companies are setting the terms of the end of today's pandemic--and the cost of allowing senseless monopolies is only more death and more people being pushed into poverty."
--Muhammad Yunus,
Nobel laureate
"Global health is on the line," she added. "History is watching. I, with my fellow laureates and scientists across the globe, urge President Biden to do the right thing and to support the TRIPS waiver, insist on pharmaceutical corporations to share vaccine technologies with the world, and strategically invest in distributed production."
Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for establishing the micro-lending Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, said that "big pharmaceutical companies are setting the terms of the end of today's pandemic--and the cost of allowing senseless monopolies is only more death and more people being pushed into poverty."
"Only government action--not philanthropy, and not the private sector--can solve today's unprecedented crisis," added Yunus. "We together urge President Biden to stand on the right side of history--and ensure a vaccine is a global common good, free of intellectual property protections."
The world leaders' and Nobel laureates' letter came on the same day that an international coalition of 250 civil society groups urged the head of the World Trade Organization to embrace a temporary suspension of coronavirus vaccine-related patents.
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To Avoid World War III, Gorbachev Says All 'Nuclear Weapons Must Be Destroyed'
"As long as weapons of mass destruction exist, primarily nuclear weapons, the danger is colossal."
Nov 03, 2019
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev warned Monday that heightened nuclear tensions between Russia and the West have dramatically increased the threat of another catastrophic global conflict.
"As long as weapons of mass destruction exist, primarily nuclear weapons, the danger is colossal," Gorbachev said in an interview with the BBC. "All nations should declare--all nations--that nuclear weapons must destroyed. This is to save ourselves and our planet."
"In different places, there are skirmishes, there is shooting, aircraft and ships being sent here, there, and everywhere. This is not the kind of situation we want. There mustn't be bloodshed."
--Mikhail GorbachevGorbachev's remarks came just months after President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that Gorbachev negotiated and signed with former U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
The pact barred both parties from possessing, testing, or using ground-launched nuclear and non-nuclear missiles with ranges between 310 and 3,400 miles.
Disarmament advocates, including Gorbachev himself, warned earlier this year that Trump's decision to ditch the Cold War-era treaty would set off a new nuclear arms race.
Asked Monday to describe current tensions between Russia and the West, Gorbachev responded, "Chilly, but still a war."
"Look at what's happening," said Gorbachev. "In different places, there are skirmishes, there is shooting, aircraft and ships being sent here, there, and everywhere. This is not the kind of situation we want. There mustn't be bloodshed."
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