David Dobrodt

During a famine of Biblical proportions – 45 million on the verge of starvation – farmers are forced to NOT produce! Join the farmers of the world and the Schiller Institute to deal with this crisis now.

Mike Billington:    This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute and The LaRouche Organization. I’m here speaking with Jim Jatras.  Jim served in the State Department in Mexico and in Russian affairs. He also served for many years as an adviser to the Republicans in the Senate. He worked in the private sector, and he’s established himself as a leading analyst on political issues internationally. Would you like to say anything else about your career, Jim?

Jim Jatras: No, I don’t think so, except to say that the extent to which somebody can be in the belly of the Beast for 30 years and come out relatively sane, I hope so. I guess we’ll let the viewers decide that.

Mike Billington:   You presented a speech to a student seminar at the Ron Paul Institute last September titled “It’s Later Than You Think.” What did you mean by that?

Jim Jatras: Well, we tend to think of political and economic. Developments in a kind of an isolation — what are good policies, what are bad policies, what are constructive, what is destructive — rather than looking at the underlying health of society itself and macro historical trends that make such policy choices viable or not. My concern was, and is, that we are approaching some kind of a crunch, some kind of a major crisis, not only in America but globally, that not only could totally remake what it means to be an American, but maybe means the end of the American nation and the republic itself. I would even go as far as to say, I don’t think the American Republic, as we’ve known it, really exists anymore. I’d like to ask the question of people: how many republics have there been in France? Well, this is the Fifth Republic. Yet the French nation still exists. So many Americans are so wedded to the notion of our constitution, our political structures, that they lose sight of the fact that that’s all they are — they’re just structures. Those structures are going through the biggest crisis, certainly since the Great Depression and possibly since the Civil War. And we don’t really know what’s going to come out on the other side of it. I think the problems America faces today are not going to get solved by an election or a political party or a political movement — we’re going to have to go through a great destructive ordeal of some sort. And we cannot really envision what comes out on the other side.

Mike Billington: The talks this week between Russia and the United States, while not an absolute failure, were described by Russia as having failed to budge an inch for the West, having failed to budge an inch on the fundamental issues of guarantees for Russian security. Nonetheless, several leading Russian experts, including Gilbert Doctorow and Dmitri Trenin, have described the talks as a victory for Russia by forcing the U.S. to admit that they could not conduct a war with a nuclear armed Russia over Ukraine. You have headed an organization called the American Institute in Ukraine and have insight into this. What’s your view of this week’s diplomatic efforts?

Jim Jatras: I’m basically in agreement with the analysts you cited, I think sometimes there’s too much of a focus on, you might say, the CNN headline — which is: “Will Russia invade Ukraine?” — when that is not really what this is about. In fact, it’s not even primarily about Ukraine, in the sense that it’s really about NATO expansion and the United States and our satellites. Let’s not even call them allies, they are satellites, basically on Russia’s doorstep, its front porch, its back porch and everywhere else, threatening its vital security interests. And the Russians have basically signaled that they’ve had enough. As President Putin said, “We have no place left to retreat to.” So I think they’re coming back to say, “All right, we’re giving you one last chance to address our security concerns seriously, to provide us with guarantees.” I don’t know what those guarantees would look like, by the way, since the West can never be trusted to keep its word. But, but nonetheless, I think they’re making one last chance to say, “Will you take our serious concerns seriously? Here are two draft treaties. Do we have a deal or not?” And I think the West is coming back and saying, “No, we don’t have a deal.”

Jim Jatras: We can delay Ukraine’s accession to NATO for about 10 years. Maybe we can have some more confidence building measures in Europe, things of that sort. I don’t think that’s going to wash with the Russians. As you mentioned, Gil Doctorow, as he’s pointed out, he thinks that the Russians are ready to act in some decisive and dramatic way, stationing advanced hypersonic weapons close to the United States that would give them the same flight time to our major cities as we are posing a threat to Russian cities.

Jim Jatras: Maybe some kind of surgical strikes within Ukraine against hostile forces that would force NATO to wake up and smell the coffee and say, “We have to accommodate these concerns or else the pain level is going to keep getting ratcheted up.” NATO is no longer the master of all it sees in Europe, as we were, say, in the 1990s, and the Russians are in a position to act. They’re acting unilaterally, and there’s really not much we can do about it unless we want to start a major war. Unfortunately, what I’m seeing from most of the establishment — there was an absurd discussion at the Atlantic Council, (which, just saying Atlantic Council almost tells you how absurd it was going to be), where the most reasonable person on the call, if you can believe it, was Evelyn Farkas –who had this horrible piece in Defense One basically talking about how we need to fight a war with the Russians in Ukraine. But she was the only one that took that seriously. The rest of them were all saying, “No, no, the Russians are just bluffing. We just need to crank up the weaponry going into Ukraine and crank up the sanctions threats and the Russians will back down.” That’s what I think is the dominant view within the establishment.

Mike Billington: This brings up the issue of some of the mad men who openly propose a nuclear war. The head of the U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Richard, said earlier last year that because of the rise of Russia and China, nuclear war, which we used to consider unlikely, is now likely, which is literally madness. And of course, you had Senator Roger Wicker directly calling for a first strike nuclear attack on Russia. Do you think these people have the power to influence decision making on the questions of war?

Jim Jatras: I think they can influence it. Even I don’t believe that there are people who are crazy enough to actually deliberately push the button and say, let’s have a nuclear war. Maybe there are. They’ve got to be out there somewhere. But the bigger concern I have is that we are in a very dangerous period, especially since I think the Russians will do something fairly dramatic before the end of the month, my guess is. Then you always have the risk of unintended escalation, that if you have — as we’ve been having increasingly for the last few years — if you have American and Russian planes playing chicken over the Black Sea or the Baltic Sea or with boats, something unintended could happen, leads to an escalation, and then we don’t really know what happens after that. So the risk is there. The question is, can we find some way to come to an understanding of security in Eastern Europe, which basically means getting out of Russia’s face, or can we not? I find it very hard to believe this establishment can accommodate them. So that risk will be there.

Mike Billington: The Obama administration and the Trump administration and the Biden administration have all referred to the violent overthrow of the elected government in Ukraine in 2014 as a “democratic revolution.” You know the situation well. What can you say about that coup and its aftermath today?

Jim Jatras: Let’s remember what triggered it. You hear, again, misreported in the Western media that it’s because Yanukovych was Moscow’s stooge and he refused to to proceed with a deal with the European Union. All Yanukovych did –first off, he wanted his country to be non-aligned, not either part of a Western bloc or part of a Russian led bloc. He very much wanted to be a neutral country, which many people, by the way, are even proposing now as a solution to the problem. Well, that solution has never been acceptable to the West. We want Ukraine in our camp, by hook or by crook, despite the fact that Ukraine is a very, very divided country. If you look at the electoral map, you look at the linguistic maps, the only way to hold Ukraine together is by having it straddle both sides of the East-West divide. Anybody with any sense knows that, but that’s not good enough with Victoria Nuland and people like that. You have this almost Bolshevik mentality which says, “The people of Ukraine have chosen their historical path.” No, they haven’t. The people of Ukraine are certainly as divided as the people in the United States are. They haven’t made a choice of any historical direction at all. It was, as you say, a coup, and it was clearly planned for many years in advance.

Jim Jatras: A lot of money being poured in there by the National Endowment for Democracy and other Soros organizations and other outside groups, to prepare for a color revolution, the overthrow the Yanukovych government, similar to what we saw recently in Belarus and very recently in Kazakhstan, an attempt to do that as well. These things don’t just come out of thin air, whatever the local roots of those might happen to be. Yanukovych (unlike President Tokayev in Kazakhstan recently) President Yanukovych dithered. He couldn’t make up his mind whether to accommodate the demands or to try to defend himself and to crush what was an insurrection — a real one, not a fake one like we talk about a year ago here in this country. He ended up paying for it by being driven out of office. At that point, we had this triumphalism coming from the West. “Ukraine is ours! Ukraine is coming to the West! Ukraine is coming to Europe! NATO,” blah blah blah. Well, the Russians felt they had some cards they could play in the Donbass and supporting the local people there who, remember, were the people who voted Yanukovych in in the first place. They saw their vote taken away by a violent mob in the streets of Kiev, and they were not willing to accept it. And they were certainly the people in Crimea were not willing to accept it, and the Russians took steps to secure their interests and the interests of those people in Ukraine.

Jim Jatras: We saw, as you know, the Minsk agreement by which Kiev was given an opportunity to repair some of this damage by saying, “OK, fine, let’s have a federalization of Ukraine. Let’s give self-rule to these areas and eastern Ukraine. Let’s not repress the Russian language. Let’s try to put Humpty Dumpty back together by accommodating the diversity of Ukraine.” And of course, they and their Western sponsors had no intention of ever doing that, despite Kiev’s legal commitment to the Minsk agreement. So that’s where we are now. In the meantime, the West has proceeded with NATO expansion. Right after Trump was elected they swept Montenegro into NATO, even though the polls showed that, at best, there was an even split within the population about whether they should join NATO. I actually think the majority was opposed to that. They just swept in North Macedonia — a ridiculous name for a ridiculous excuse for a country. Why are we doing all of this stuff? It has nothing to do with American security, certainly, but it does have to do with tightening a stranglehold around Russia, which has been the purpose of NATO ever since, supposedly, the Cold War ended in 1991.

Mike Billington: What do you think of the relations between forces within the U.S. and Europe with the overtly neo-Nazi groupings within Ukraine. Even Israel has complained bitterly that Ukraine is allowing these neo-Nazi organizations to parade with swastikas and with pictures of Stepan Bandera and so forth. What’s behind these institutions and how much influence do they have over actual policy?

Jim Jatras: It’s hard to say, Mike, because we know that especially in the Republican Party — not exclusively — some of this kind of World War Two Losers Association stuff, went all the way back to the 1950s, really, even in the late 1940s, where the CIA and MI6 and other — you may be familiar with something called the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. This is something that was around largely led by West Ukrainian pro-Nazi elements that went all the way back to the late 1940s and was originally created by British intelligence and then was adopted by the Americans as well. But there were many groups like that. Now, some of them may have been simply people who were nationalists of various sorts and thought that their countries had gotten a raw deal on the territorial arrangements in Europe in both World Wars, and others, I think, were very ideologically committed to something along the lines of fascism or Nazism. And we do see some elements like that in Ukraine. 

Jim Jatras: I would draw a parallel to the way the United States, especially the intelligence agencies, have used jihadists of various sorts as proxies in various wars, going all the way back to Afghanistan in the nineteen eighties. We used them in Bosnia, we used them in Kosovo, we use them in Libya. We are still using them today in Syria. There is, I think, a very cynical attitude of the intelligence agencies toward extremist groups, whether they’re neo-Nazis or whether they’re jihadists. They say, “Yeah, these people are operational, we can use them with a degree of plausible deniability. If they get into trouble, too bad for them. ‘The secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ But they can get the job done because they’re ruthless.” So I think the degree of cynicism about groups like this is really hard for most Americans to believe, that their government would engage in.

Mike Billington: The coup in Ukraine also included an effort to separate the Ukraine Orthodox Church from the Russian Orthodox Church as part of this anti-Russian hysteria. You are a member of the Greek Orthodox Church and you’re active in issues regarding Orthodox Christianity. What can you tell us about what was going on in Ukraine and where that stands today?

Jim Jatras: Well, a lot of this is “inside baseball” in the Orthodox Church. I’m of Greek origin personally. The parish I attend most of the time is a Russian parish although it’s mostly full of just regular Americans. They are some Greeks, some Russians, some Serbs, Romanians and so forth, but it’s mostly just Americans. We’re still one Church at this point. We like to say the devil can never subvert our Church because he can’t figure out the organization chart. We have this feud going on between Constantinople and Moscow over Ukraine and what really was the status of Ukraine in the 17th century and all this sort of thing. But I think we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that, again, just as I was mentioning with regard to jihadist and neo-Nazi groups, for outside meddlers, religion is simply another lever that they can use to try to manipulate society and to try to even break down society. For example, we’re talking about specifically the Orthodox Church: back in 1948, there was essentially a coup in Constantinople (Istanbul) that removed the patriarch then, Maximos, who was considered to be too friendly toward the Russian Church — which, let’s be honest, at the time was under the control of the Soviet authorities — and replace him with the archbishop here in America Athenagoras, who was actually flown over there on Truman’s plane and installed by the U.S. government, the Greek government and the Turkish government acting in concert and has been an asset of the United States, the State Department and the CIA, ever since 1948. Of course, this is also consistent with Constantinople’s kind of “neo-papal” aspirations within the Orthodox Church, which is itself a-historical. At the same time, you’ve got Russia, which — again in a very peculiar structure among the local Orthodox churches — is itself a majority of the entire Orthodox Church, a good chunk of that being in Ukraine. Now in Ukraine, the Orthodox Church is called the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It is an autonomous part of the Russian Orthodox Church, it is self ruling in virtually all aspects. That church is the canonical Church in Ukraine. Its status has not changed. What has happened is, with U.S. support, Constantinople has tried to create a rival Orthodox church in Ukraine from a group of, actually several groups of, schismatics that they tried to cobble together into a new church. That’s where we stand right now. We have two competing Orthodox churches in Ukraine. The canonical one aligned with Moscow, which is very much the majority, and a much smaller one supported by the United States and Constantinople, which is not acceptable to most of the rest of the world, in Romania and Jerusalem and Serbia and Bulgaria and the other places of the Orthodox Church. Again, I know this is very complex inside baseball, but what it shows is frankly a degree of sophistication, and again, cynicism of the Western powers that they’re willing to manipulate this in order to make some kind of a political game. Because I think the way they see it is, just as the Maidan in 2014 was a political coup to try to separate Russia from Ukraine, this is, if you will, a spiritual coup to try to accomplish the same thing, to take two very closely kindred people in language, culture and especially religion, and set them at odds against each other. It’s not working, it’s not successful, but it is creating a lot of discord, a lot of unhappiness and hurt, and even to some extent, violence.

Mike Billington: Georgia is yet another country where the NED, Soros apparatus ran a color revolution in 2003, the so-called Rose Revolution, which saw the mobs connected to Mikhail Saakashvili, overthrow the government of Eduard Shevardnadze, who himself had been the Soviet Union’s foreign minister before becoming president of Georgia, a position that he kept after the falling apart of the Soviet Union and Georgia became independent. Then in 2019, you’ve pointed out that there was a second color revolution — you could call it a “rainbow revolution” — which was unleashed by the Soros organization, and some people in the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, demanding support for an LGBTQ parade, a Pride parade, against the strong opposition of the 80% of Georgia’s population who are Orthodox Christians. Where did this lead and what is the status of that at this point?

Jim Jatras: I think to a large part is simply the application on the local level of what is a huge, huge part of Western policy, which is the promoting of — I’m trying to think of a … — socially and morally destructive forces the equal of LGBT. As I like to say, there’s no trans-Atlanticism without transgenderism. This is a huge part of American and Western democracy promotion and human rights promotion. There’s a great meme out there of an American soldier with an automatic weapon and a flag and a skull mask saying, “Until I’m out of ammo or out of blood, I will fight for homosexuality in Botswana.” This is one of the great causes for which Americans are willing to shed blood and treasure? Evidently so. And I think part of it has to do with the fact that if you look at maps of social attitudes like, for example, towards same sex marriage or toward the role of religion and public life and things like that, you will notice a rather odd thing — that is, that Eastern Europe, the areas that were under communism, are much more conservative than the countries of Western Europe. Maybe it was because as a progressive Promethean force, communism was such a failure that the underlying social attitudes are actually much more pre-modern conservative when it comes to social and family values and religious values than Western Europe, and presumably the United States, that have been corrupted by decades of consumerism and all these other materialist forces.

Jim Jatras: So I think that the Western policymakers instinctively understand that if we want to conquer these societies, we need to break down their social attitudes. And one way to do that is to tell them, “Hey, if you want to be part of the West, you want to be part of the EU and NATO, you want to be part of the democratic club? It’s a full package. You have to take this as well.” I think that’s what they were doing there in Georgia, but they also do that in Ukraine. I even remember there was one of the priests from the church in Odessa, after they had a big Pride parade there, he went out afterwards with holy water to re-sanctify the streets after the parade had passed through. People there don’t like this sort of thing, but nonetheless, the Americans and the U.S. embassies with their rainbow flags and all that, they’re all over it. They’re being forced to do this because, well, “this is democracy. This is the West. You have to get used to it.”

Mike Billington: I’m reminded that Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov once said regarding the so-called “Western values” that you hear spoken of so often, that the West insists on defending, are not the values of their grandfathers.

Jim Jatras: No, they’re not. And by the way, I can remember back in the 1990s, when I was at the Senate, there was a big issue about giving observer status to some big coalition of LGBT organizations, which included groups like NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association, which is a pro pedophile group. This was a very controversial thing at the U.N. This was under the Clinton administration. North America, the U.S., Canada and all of Western Europe were really promoting this, and the countries in Eastern Europe — this was the 1990s — newly liberated from communism were saying, “What is going on here? We have to accept {this?}.” I mean, the communists there, they never would have accepted anything like that. So you really had this kind of weird thing, where these Western countries, the paragons of democracy, are promoting this kind of depravity. Latin America was opposed to it. The Islamic world was opposed to it. The Far East, I think, was mostly puzzled by it, by “what kind of people are these?” And then you had Eastern Europe who was sort of on the fence, because they knew they should be integrating in with the democratic West, but at the same time they couldn’t figure out why in the world we would be pushing something like this.

Mike Billington: You’ve noted often that the leaders in both parties — you’ve named in particular, John McCain, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton — have never seen a war they didn’t like. Biden’s push for the war started by George W. Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq, is well known, that he promoted that strongly. But less well known is that Biden led the effort to launch a war on Serbia in 1999, which led to 78 days of bombing without U.N. authorization, laying waste to much of that country. Biden also backed the al-Qaida-linked Kosovo Liberation Army in that conflict and the independence of Kosovo. So you were involved in some of this, if you could explain that?

Jim Jatras: At the time I was the analyst at the Republican Policy Committee in the Senate, and the Clinton administration had decided on — “intervention” is a nice word — I would say in “aggression” in the Balkans, not only in Bosnia, but also in Kosovo. I tried, to whatever extent I could, to inform Republican Senators and their staff, which it was my job to do, as to what was the reality behind some of the claims of the Clinton administration, That was a little difficult to do when the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate at that time was Bob Dole, who was on the same program as Biden and the Clinton administration were. But I did my best to try to say, “Look, here are the open sources. Here’s what they’re saying. Here’s the various Al Qaida and other groups that are involved here in terms of the human rights and other claims. Here’s what’s really going on. Yeah, we’ve unleashed a brutal inter-communal war between Serbs and Muslims and Croats and Albanians. Rather than trying to find some way for a peaceful resolution, we’re trying to aggravate it, in a conflict that was kind of a rock-paper-scissors thing.  Well, “the Serbs are always the bad guys. Let’s just start with that and work from there.”

And by the way, some of this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, as I mentioned, the World War Two Losers Association. If you look at a map of occupied Europe in the Balkans in 1943, and compare it to the way we carved up Yugoslavia, the two maps look awfully similar. We essentially adopted all of the Axis clients from during the war and said, “Oh, these are now democratic NATO clients.” So, you know, again, the roots of these things tend to go back a long way. In any case, obviously I was unsuccessful in trying to enlighten people about what was going on, although I will say that when the vote on the Kosovo war occurred in Congress, the Republicans voted primarily against it. Maybe a lot of it was just partisan because it was the Clinton administration, a Democratic administration. But even with Bob Dole in the Senate and Henry Hyde, at the time the Republican leader in the House, whipping votes in favor of the war, the Republicans in the Senate voted, I think very heavily in the majority against the war, and in the House, not only a very heavy majority of Republicans vote no, they even voted down the war resolution. It failed on a tie vote in the House of Representatives.

Jim Jatras: Nonetheless, Clinton proceeded with the war, which tells you something about the integrity of our constitutional process, when a war can take place not only against international law, in violation of the U.N. Charter, aggression against another country, but even against American domestic law. When the Congress says “no, you do not have the authority to go to war,” and they said, “Yeah, well, I’m going to do it anyway.” And so there are many things that are all wrapped up in these things. The long and the short of it is that it is amazing to me how many people, even who are essentially anti-war and against these wars — You remember there was a great series by Oliver Stone about the history of American wars and aggression around the world. I notice he skipped over the Balkans. He sort of forgot that war. These are the wars everybody wants to not really pay attention to because they sort of went down in the history as the place where NATO, the West, you know, came as the cavalry with the rescue. We were there for mom and apple pie and human rights and democracy. Well, it really wasn’t that way. But nonetheless, that then set the stage and the precedent for places like Iraq and Libya.

Mike Billington: On Kosovo. Secretary Tony Blinken and other U.S. officials have insisted that under the so-called rule of law — which means their own made up rules, nations cannot change the borders of other nations by force. Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, responded to that statement by saying, “Do we get it right? That Washington no longer supports Kosovo’s sovereignty?” You were directly involved in much of this. What is Zakharova referring to?

Jim Jatras: Let’s remember, under U.N. resolution 1244, which ended the war in Kosovo, Kosovo was supposed to remain part of Serbia, and there were supposed to be negotiations about its status with the fullest possible autonomy, which is what Belgrade was offering. They were willing to jump through any hoop requested of them in terms of whatever autonomy could ever exist anywhere on Earth, for any part of any country, they were willing to offer that to Kosovo. But the Western powers, especially Washington, had decided {ab initio}: “No, no. The only possible solution is independence.” Well, the U.N. resolution doesn’t say that. At that time — I was in the private sector — I was involved in lobbying on behalf of the Bishop of Kosovo, Bishop Artemije, against the American policy of pushing for independence for Kosovo. I would say we met with some success. That was supposed to be resolved by the end of 2006. It wasn’t. It was dragged out until the beginning of 2008, when I think the Western powers thought they were losing support, so they needed to push the button they needed to move quickly on unilaterally recognizing Kosovo as an independent state, even though there was no legal mandate for that at all. And certainly there was no negotiated solution to that effect. I think that’s one reason why we have a stalemate now where you have about one hundred and ten countries at last count that recognized Kosovo, but a lot of those are micro states, that if you look at the vast majority of the world’s population, India, China and so forth, not to mention Russia, even still today, five members of the European Union — Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Spain and Slovakia — have not recognized Kosovo’s independence. So it’s not an acceptable solution for anybody, but that’s where we are right now.

Jim Jatras: I think the point that Zakharova is referring to is, you say you can’t change borders by force. Well, what do you think the West did in 1999 in the war and then 2008 in recognizing Kosovo’s independence? We did precisely that without any legal authority at all. We detached part of a state, or at least claimed to, and say this is now a new country. Well, OK, you know, some things, once you break them, stay broken. Once you have a principle like the inviolability of borders, and say, “Oh, well, we can break them when we want, but you can’t.” Well, the other side says, “Oh no? Watch.” And then, if you want, might makes right. If you want the law of the jungle, if you want to say that the U.N. guarantees of the inviolability of borders and state sovereignty no longer matter, OK, they don’t matter anymore, I guess. Well, who asked for that?

Mike Billington: On China’s role in all of this, the Belt and Road Initiative, which is taking the the economic miracle within China over these past decades through massive infrastructure, lifting the productive platform of the nation as a whole, they are taking that to the rest of the world. they are also very active in Eastern Europe in huge amounts of trade through the thousands of trains that now traverse the new Silk Road routes from China to Europe, and also through investments in infrastructure across the region, especially in Eastern Europe. How do you see the difference between China’s approach to international relations to that of the United States?

Jim Jatras: This is something we’ve discussed before, especially with regard to some of the ideas that Mr. LaRouche was championing for many decades. It really comes down to construction versus destruction. Are you going to build? Are you’re going to integrate — a rising tide raises all boats? Or are you going to try to look at the other people trying to do that and say, “Let’s beggar thy neighbor, let’s try to throw roadblocks into that. Let’s try to break it down.” We’ve talked about in the past. For example, why don’t we have a land bridge across the Bering Strait, with trade between Eurasia and North America? Why are we not building our own Belt and Road Initiative here in the Western Hemisphere? Why are we not trying to come up with a way that countries can act in a cooperative way to build up their economies and to maximize their mutual advantages in the way that I think the Chinese and the Russians and the other countries behind Eurasian integration are doing that. Our response is what? To try to give the Chinese the hotfoot in Xinjiang, to try to give the Russians a hot foot in Kazakhstan with a coup there, rather than trying to find a way to build up the world economy, build up standards of living. We’re trying to find a way to play “dog in the manger” by trying to retard those efforts if it’s being done by somebody else, while we neglect to do it ourselves. We’re not doing any of these things. I think we have — unfortunately, put it in a nutshell — that is the distinction between construction and destruction, and it’s a really sad thing. But that gets back to what we’re saying about the nature of our ruling class and the duopoly in this country. They seem to see eye to eye on these things, about preserving American hegemony, primarily based on military power {ad infinitum} and using whatever dirty tricks in the book they can, to try to preserve that and to keep the other guys down.

Mike Billington: President Trump insisted — one of the reasons he got elected — that he was going to rebuild the American industrial economy, and Wall Street basically said, “Forget it. We have to bail out the bankrupt financial institutions,” and as a result, really nothing, nothing has changed. We continue to see no infrastructure and no development within the U.S. Do you have thoughts on that whole financial situation?

Jim Jatras: I’m not an economist. I’m not an expert on financial matters. As I say, I do understand the difference between construction and destruction. I think Trump did want to do that. I think he did have a concept of a national economy. When it comes to China, yeah, I do think our China trade relationship with China is terribly lopsided. It seems to me that is because, frankly, it’s beneficial to a lot of corporate America to hollow out our industries, our production, and ship those operations to foreign countries. China, certainly, but many other countries as well. And then, of course, bring their goods back in the United States, duty free, basically undermining our national economy. At the same time –I was saying this back at the time of the Trump administration –there’s a natural deal here between the United States and China, to where we rebalance our trade relationship to favor American production and the American industrial base, but at the same time, we get out of China’s face in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and so forth, the same way that we should be getting out of Russia’s place in Eastern Europe, that it seems to me there’s the making of a deal there. I don’t know that Trump really saw that. It seemed to me a lot of people in his administration had a strong animus against China across the board, that not only did they want to address the trade issues, which I think is legitimate, but also wanted to threaten them on some of the security issues, which I thought made no sense whatsoever.

Jim Jatras: But that’s where we are. But I do think Trump, on some level, at least in his gut, had a sense that we need to build up our own national economy, get control of our borders, get control of our trade. Unfortunately, like many other things, I don’t think he really had any idea how to do that. He certainly populated his administration with all the wrong people when it came to getting any of his agenda from 2016 done. When you turn to the Heritage Foundation and the Republican National Committee to hire a bunch of Bush retreads for your administration, hey, you’re going to get your tax cut, which any Republican president would want to push through the Congress, but you’re not going to get an infrastructure bill, you’re not going to get any of the other things you want. I think looking back on it, Trump was a great missed opportunity and perhaps in some sense, the last missed opportunity for an America that, maybe, could have been revived.

Mike Billington: As to the two party system, you were an adviser to the Republican Party in the Senate, as you mentioned, for many years. You have insight into the two party system that we have today — what Lyndon LaRouche referred to as the two potty system. What is your view on democracy in America today, which the war party claims to be defending in their wars around the world?

Jim Jatras: To be precise, I was an adviser to the Senate Republican leadership, which is a Senate office, not a party office. The structure of the Senate, as in the House, is partisan, but it’s the Senate, part of the U.S. government. It’s not the Republican Party {per se.} I don’t know, Mike, we might not be fully in agreement on these things. I’m a pretty retrograde guy when it comes to political theory. I do notice that the founding fathers did not intend to create a democracy. They knew their history, they knew their Aristotle, they knew how democracies tend to end. For the first 80 or 90 years of our republic until the Civil War, we had a confederal republic. And then after the Civil War, until at least in the post-World War Two period, we had a federal democracy. But then increasingly in recent decades, we’ve had a consolidated administrative state, managerial state. I don’t think you would even call it democracy anymore. This is the way democracies tend to end. Once you have, everybody has the vote, everybody can say, “Well, I want, I want, I want.” You tend to vote yourself benefits out of the other guy’s pocket. And that goes for the plutocracy, too. They say, “Well, we can manipulate the levers of this thing too, and we have our propaganda machine in the media” and so forth. So none of this should be particularly surprising where you get to a moribund state where a constitution on paper is simply honored in the breach.

Jim Jatras: It’s honored with fingers crossed behind your back, and it really doesn’t exist anymore. The fact that we have this entrenched duopoly, which is as entrenched in America today as the CPSU was entrenched as a one party system in the Soviet Union, is something that is — I don’t know that there’s any coming back from that, except in the same sense that, well, when the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and something new arose from the ashes.  Unfortunately I think that’s sort of where we are now in America today, what that looks like, how bad it’s going to be, with things like supply chain breakdown, collapse of the dollar. Who knows what else is going to come, whether it results in the breakup of the country or what level of violence. I don’t think we really know. I explored some of this in the piece you mentioned earlier, the “It’s Later Than You Think.” I think unfortunately — and again, we might disagree on this, Mike — a lot of this is baked into the cake. I don’t know that there’s much any of us can do by shouting from the rooftops that “bad things is a’comin.” The bad things will come, and then we’ll see how we get through it, who survives, who doesn’t, and what comes from the ashes.

Mike Billington: At the end of of that talk you gave to the students at the Ron Paul Institute, you said that, I have a quote: “I think your ability to impact the big picture regarding any of this is slim to none.” That’s somewhat like you are saying right now. That’s clearly rather pessimistic. As you know, LaRouche always told the youth, and others, that in a systemic crisis like we’re in today — and you acknowledge it’s a systemic crisis — the ability to make big changes is even greater than normal, rather than less, precisely because the old system is falling apart and people are forced to give up their delusions and look for new solutions, including outside of the United States, internationally. So how do you respond to that?

Jim Jatras: Well, I would say that it largely depends on the human factor and the mechanisms. I remember during the 2020 election, so many people were saying, people who believe that the vote was stolen — and I’m I’m one of those people —  “Well look, the Supreme Court’s going to do this, or the state legislators are going to do that, or Congress is going to do this.” And I kept saying, “No, no, no. None of those things are going to happen, because those people who are in charge of the system, in charge of being the guardians of the system, will not do their duty even when the facts are plain.” I think a lot of us have a kind of a naive — and I’m not calling Mr. LaRouche naive — but a lot of us have a naive faith, in facts. If you throw the facts on the table — whether it’s about COVID or whether it’s about CRT and Black Lives Matter and Antifa, or whether it’s about foreign policy — that people will wake up and say, “Oh my God, you’re right, let’s do the right thing.” The trouble is, you have people holding all the levers of power who will not do the right thing. That means what you have is stasis. You have stasis until the collapse comes. Now what that happens after that? 

Jim Jatras: Yeah, I think there are things that people can do. I’m not advising complacency by any means. I just don’t see the levers. I don’t see the pathways to changing national policy even in the middle of a crisis until the collapse comes. That doesn’t mean that the local, and to some extent at the state level, things can’t be done like, you know, I live in a rural county in Virginia. We did pretty good in this last election here. We’re very optimistic here at the county level, maybe even a little optimistic at the state level. That may be a little naive. But you look at states like Florida and Texas to some extent, maybe we have a kind of a soft secession going on in some of the states and localities in America where, yeah, a healthy America could still be sustained and provide the groundwork for a kind of a revival of the American spirit and something like an American republic in the future. But I think those pathways are not yet clear to us. I think being active at the local level, being active with your community, acting with likeminded people and why conversations like this, I think are valuable, are something we should focus on. But not to expect that, “oh great. The Republicans are going to take the House this year,” and that goodness and niceness will break out, because it won’t.

Mike Billington: Lyndon LaRouche always, always represented himself as an American, supporting the American system of Hamilton and Lincoln and Roosevelt, but he always insisted he represented the human race as a whole, and fought for the human race as a whole, rather than for one nation. You have followed LaRouche for many, many years, and you’ve been involved in many of our discussions and forums and conferences. How do you see LaRouche, his role in history and his impact on the international situation today?

Jim Jatras: I think he will be remembered as a visionary and maybe a reminder of what could have been, that if there had been people who are willing to listen to common sense at the right time, when opportunities had not been frittered away one after another, the outcome could have been different, that we would not have to go through this crisis or crunch or whatever you want to call it, which I think we will have to go through now. I think one of the things that occurred to me, looking back on my comments at the time when we were asking about his exoneration to try to get a pardon and a exoneration for him from the unjust prosecution — persecution that he suffered, and that you and many others suffered, by the way, at the hands of Robert Mueller and the establishment. You think about that. What if, if those policies had been heeded at the time when they could have made a big difference, rather than saying, “let’s squash this guy,” which was what the response of the power was at the time. I think it could have made a big difference in the life of this country, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. Remember, he was out talking about these things, how many decades ago? There were how many missed opportunities through all of those decades? And now here we are. So I’m not saying those ideas are not applicable now. As you point out, we do have to look at the rest of the world, that to a great extent some of the things he proposed about a new Silk Road and so forth are being followed by the Eurasian powers. I don’t want to sound naive in that regard. I’m sure the Chinese and the Russians and other countries are looking out for number one, the way, frankly, a national government should do. I think we discussed a little earlier, we have so many people on the Right in this country today who are calling for the “China, China, China” alarm, the same way the Left fell for “Russia, Russia, Russia” during the Trump years. “Oh, the Chinese Communists, you know, they’re behind everything.’ Well, first off, despite the formality of the CCP being the ruling party in China, I think it’s pretty clear that it’s not — I like to call it Han National Bolshevism. The bottle may be red and has a picture of Mao on it, but the wine inside the bottle is Han Nationalist and Confucian, and there’s simply nothing really communist about it other than the name of the party. Now, it’s authoritarian. In some ways, it behaves in ways that we would consider quite inhumane. But I think it reflects the long history of China as a civilization, and it is focused on China’s national interest, but not in a kind of a “let’s destroy everybody else” kind of mentality, but rather that China will have its greatest flowering and opportunity when other people do as well. Why can we not see that in our leadership? I think it gets back to the level of corruption that has become almost ubiquitous at the upper ends of our system, or as, hopefully, at the lower end, the local level, maybe to a lesser extent on the state level, they’re still healthy things there that can be preserved.

Mike Billington: Thank you. Any further thoughts or last words for our readers and supporters?

Jim Jatras: No, not really, I would just ask people if they want to see what I have written –I have lost my muse for writing, I do try to do interviews from time to time. But I am an incessant tweeter, until they kick me off. So go to @JimJatras if you want to see what my latest thoughts or dumb ideas I have. And   I do want to say that, black pilled as I do tend to sound —   I am a Boomer after all — I am fundamentally an optimist in many respects. As I pointed out with respect to France, the fact that one republic is ending doesn’t mean the nation goes away. And I do believe there is an American nation. I realize that concept is not well understood or accepted in America today because we tend to think in “civic terms” rather than national terms. But I do think that there is a future for the American people as we come through this crisis, which still, I think has another five to seven years to go. And we’ll see how bad it gets. But something, some phoenix, will arise from the ashes. At the same time, even in a greater sense, on a moral, spiritual level, the hairs on our head are all numbered. God is in His heaven. Nothing happens without His allowance or his will.  If we pray without ceasing and have confidence in the final triumph of good, it will sustain us through even very difficult times.

Mike Billington: Ok, thank you very much, Jim. I think this will have a very good and long term impact on those who have a chance to watch or listen or read this. Thank you.

Thank you, Mike, for the opportunity. 

Dennis Speed and Mike Billington (Executive Intelligence Review) in dialogue with Ray McGovern (Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA-ret.), Co-Founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity).

SPEED: Now, what we’re going to do is hear from a couple of people who are going to discuss this. That’s Ray McGovern and also Mike Billington. I just want to say about Ray, I wrote about you about 11 days ago at the top of something I was writing. “Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has insisted that only a metanoia, a 180-degree spiritual bootlegger’s turn away from a self-defeating, self-destructive indifference to promoting the General Welfare of people all over the world can preserve any nation, including a declining United States.”

Now, I’m not asking you to take responsibility for my remarks, but I would like to point out that our art of analysis, of actual strategic evaluation seems to be severely endangered right now, particularly in the United States. You’re one of the few people who is still practicing it. So, I’d like you to start us off, both in terms of responding to what Helga said, but you’ve been looking at what’s been said over the last week, week and a half, and Mike’s going to have plenty to say, because he’s been speaking to a few interesting people on his own about these matters. So, make it a little informal, you go ahead and tell us what your own thinking is about these matters, and then we’ll hear from Mike, and then continue to discussion.

RAY MCGOVERN: Well, Dennis, thank you for the introduction. I hope you didn’t get too many bricks thrown at you from describing me that way. I wish I could tell you that we were further toward metanoia at present than we were back when I used that term.

We are inches further, or inches more toward metanoia now. Let me tell you what I think, and why I think it. I should sort of as a clearness or honesty in advertising, say that I’m an outlier on this, just as I was an outlier for four years on Russiagate and so forth. But I’m used to that, just so you know what you’re getting.

Watching the pronouncements by official Kremlin spokespeople and the play from these Biden-Putin conversations, and most important, what happened this last week starting on Monday in Geneva, persuades me that we’re on the road to a relaxation of tension. That Putin got a major concession from Mr. Biden, who very cleverly has told his people to play that down, and that talks will continue. I’ll say that again, the Russians didn’t stomp out of the talks, they didn’t invade Ukraine. They didn’t do anything other than to insist on their maximum position, and then sotto voce saying, well we got a big commitment here. We’re going to reinvent the intermediate forces treaty, the INF Treaty. Most Americans don’t understand this because it happened in 1987, but what was happening in those days was that the Russians had these intermediate and shorter-range ballistic missiles called SS-20s. We had Pershing 2s, the equivalent. This made the strategic situation incredibly tentative, because instead of 30-35 minutes warning from an ICBM shoot-out, you had maybe 14-15 minutes. These were bases in Europe, the European part of Russia, and Germany and elsewhere. Wise statesmen got together and said, this is crazy. We got to limit this. We don’t need this; we’ve already got a balance of strategic power here, thanks to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. So, we don’t need these things. Let’s get rid of them.

People like me kind of said, “Right. We’re going to get rid of a whole class of very sophisticated ballistic missiles.” But, they did. One key element there was that it was verifiable. My friend Scott Ritter, for example, was one of hundreds of U.S. inspectors who were there when they blew up these sites in Russia. So, that’s possible, and what happened more recently is not only lamentable, but stupid and reversible. Now, be the first to know that U.S.-Russian talks are in the process of getting underway to reverse that, and to reinstate something like the INF Treaty. Will it be exact? No, it won’t, but it will place limits on offensive strike missiles in that part of Europe. How come you’re the first to know this? You’re the first to be crazy enough to listen to McGovern; that’s the first answer. But the second one is, McGovern has this arcane methodology, it’s called media analysis. I mean it’s sort of a sub-discipline of political analysis, I suppose. And what he does is, he reads stuff one day, and the next day he reads stuff, and then he figures out what’s different. When Vladimir Putin called Joe Biden and says, “Look, our negotiators are going to get together in just 12 days, but I need to talk to you now.” Biden said, “OK.” And they talked on the telephone on Dec. 30th this past year.

How do we know what eventuated? Well, the Kremlin put out an immediate report, and they said—and I’ll quote it here, because I don’t want to misstate it. “Joseph Biden emphasized that Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.” I’ll say it again. Biden emphasized that the U.S. has no intention of deploying offensive strike missiles in Ukraine. What about the American side? Well, they didn’t really include that in their read-out. How about Jake Sullivan? I guess he was the senior administration official that briefed all those reporters on background. Well, he said, nothing much happened. One of the reporters said, “Was there anything at all that we could report?” And Sullivan says, “Nothing I can think of.”

Well, that’s a bit disingenuous, but it’s also clever. Because he didn’t want to give these reporters, who have their own axes to grind, time to criticize what Biden had done. It’s a mixed blessing that Americans don’t know what Biden had done, but eventually the mainstream media is going to have to deal with it, because those negotiations are in train. We know from Wendy Sherman and Ryabkov that they said these arms control issues are going to be pursued now. And you know, you can’t conclude these talks in a week or a month; it’s going to take some time. Both sides agree that it’s going to take some time to do this.

Another straw in the wind, but not really for somebody who follows the media closely. Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, who’s way out there as a hardliner, who says, “Our arms are ready for Russia.” What did he say? Again, you won’t see this reported, but here it is in TASS in English. Reporters can read this. He says, “‘Concrete possibilities for limits on the missiles Russia and NATO should be discussed, but not discussed publicly.’ He stressed that the Alliance was ready to discuss not only limitations, but a ban on intermediate-range missiles. ‘We have clearly expressed our willingness to sit down and discuss these kinds of limitations on different levels, banning all intermediate-range weapons which are a concern in Europe,’ the Secretary-General said.”

That’s Stoltenberg! It was missed by the western press. What am I saying here? I’m saying that if you get through all the propaganda, all the stuff that’s sort of boiler-plate—“The Russians are demanding that Ukraine and Georgia will never become members of NATO.” Is that a realistic prospect? No. How long does it take a country like that to qualify for membership in NATO? Several years, maybe decades, maybe never. If you’re Vladimir Putin, what’s more important to you? To get NATO and the U.S. to sign onto an agreement that says we’ll never let Ukraine and Georgia into NATO? When, as Putin points out, Ukraine is already being populated by all kinds of arms emplacements. In other words, Putin said, membership in NATO for Ukraine may sort of be a distinction without a difference, because what they’re doing right now is moving all kinds of troops and offensive capabilities into Ukraine.

What I’m saying here is this: You have to distinguish between the rhetoric, which is “No, no Ukraine, no Georgia in NATO.” And we, NATO, and Wendy Sherman, and Blinken and Nod and Sullivan, we all stood up to those Russians. We adamantly said, “Under no circumstances! Win!” Putin was hardly surprised by that. I think he was a little surprised—let’s be realistic—that he frightened Joe Biden with a deployment of—how many? 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border. And persuaded him that, hey, you had a Cuban Missile Crisis which not only bears a resemblance to how we feel now, but is an exact replica. And guess what, Joe? We’re going to react the same way the U.S. when Khrushchev tried to put those medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba.

As an aside, and as an indication of how dangerous this really is, Khrushchev did put those medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. We found them finally. CIA U-2s found them. But guess what? We never thought they were armed with nuclear warheads. And guess what? They were. We found that out decades later. So, just think, if John Kennedy had been more susceptible to the blandishments of our military, they wanted to give Russia a bloody nose? Long story short, we might not be here; there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be here today to discuss these things. Another sort of aside on this, is simply that here’s Putin before all his generals and admirals above a certain grade, it’s the 21st of December. He’s giving them the word. He says, this time we’re going to have mutually agreed upon signed, legally binding documents to limit arms. And he looks out, and he sees—I’m guessing here, I wasn’t there, right? He sees a couple of generals say, “Yeah, right. That was really helpful on the ABM Treaty, wasn’t it? Or, the INF Treaty? We had mutually binding international agreements, and the Americans just walked out, without explanation, for God’s sake. Tell us more about those mutually binding agreements there, Vlad.”

In the next paragraph, Putin says, “OK, the U.S. has not given much respect to mutually binding international agreements.” And he mentions the INF Treaty and the ABM Treaty. So, you know, it will be nice to get these kinds of agreements, but what Putin is most interested in is what happens on the ground. And they’re negotiating on that. If you don’t believe me, or you don’t believe Wendy Sherman, believe Jens Stoltenberg, who is on the far right of the hawks in NATO.

The last thing I’ll say has to do with analysis of what the New York Times puts out. I’m just becoming aware how war-mongering the New York Times has always been. I go back a ways. More recently, I go back to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And of course, the New York Times was a main culprit in selling that story. Not only Judy Miller, who did finally get relieved of duty, but a fellow named David Sanger. He was equally responsible. I have the book on David Sanger, and I’ve written about him, but suffice it so say here that in July 2002, so 7-8 months before the war, before the U.S.-British attack on Iraq, Sanger had this article in the New York Times which said, no fewer than seven times, that there were, as flat fact, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now, this was what he was instructed to say by his intelligence sources. It was a very interesting juncture, because that’s when W Bush and the administration were trying to sell the idea to Congress so that Congress would, in its own stupid way, authorize war.

Today, we have a lead article, right on the front page above the fold, David Sanger. What’s he saying? He’s saying that my intelligence say that the Russians, those dastardly clever Russians, do you know what they’re planning now? They’re planning to infiltrate agents to shoot up other Russians so they can have a pretext, a casus belli, a reason to attack Ukraine. They are so lusting after some kind of justification to attack Ukraine, that they’ll kill their own Russians there. How about that? What’s his source? The same guys he talked to back in 2002; the WMD guys. How do I know that? They’re the same unknown sources who are reluctant to give their names because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Just in contrast, the Russians have also warned about a false flag justification. And how did they do that? It was this fellow named Sergei Shoigu, who happens to be their Minister of Defense. At the same gathering at which Putin talked to all the top admirals and generals, what he said was that we know there are 150 or so Americans, contractors of course, who are preparing this kind of false flag attack in the area of Ukraine, and that they have sarin gas, which is one of their preferred methods of false-flag attacks. So, you have Shoigu identifying himself, he’s not an unnamed source in intelligence who’s reluctant to give his name because of the sensitivity of the subject. No, he’s gone right ahead of time.

Is this significant? It is in a sort of intelligence playing around thing. I’m sure that both sides are equally prepared to do just this kind of thing. The operative bottom line for me is simply that Putin is much too clever, much too restrained, and much too much a statesman—and I’ll say that again, statesman—to get himself involved in attacking Ukraine, much less occupying this basket case. It used to be the bread basket of Europe; now, it’s a basket case, thanks to the coup that we, the United States and other Western intelligence services, arranged on the 22nd of February, 2014, aptly called the most blatant coup in history. Why? Because it was advertised; it was advertised on the 4th of February on YouTube. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland talking to U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in Kiev, saying, “We’ve got it all arranged now. Yats is the guy. Incoming Prime Minister. Tell these other guys to wait in the wings here. Did you talk to Jake Sullivan?” “Yeah.” “OK, what did he say? Oh, good. Biden is free to come in and solidify this thing, and we can glue it together.” Pyatt says, “What about the EU?” And Victoria Nuland says—and I don’t want to destroy the nice tone of this conversation, but she uses the F-word. She says, “F— the EU!”

Was this a real conversation? Yeah! You had the voices. Did they know it was going to monitored? No. Did Nuland apologize? She apologized, but only for saying the F-word, not for arranging the coup. She said, I’m really sorry I said that; I didn’t really mean it. Of course, that’s exactly what she meant. And that’s what they’re doing even now. The question is, how long the EU will put up with this kind of thing.

I could go on for a while, and I’ve probably outlasted my welcome, but perhaps more can be said in what ensues. The operative thing I’d like to leave you with is that right now, many of the leading newspapers—that is, the Wall Street Journal and so forth—are very reluctant to mention that discussions will now take place on intermediate-range ballistic missiles between the U.S. and Russia. Did you know? I ask you, did you know that Biden promised that we have no plans to deploy offensive strike missiles in Ukraine? Did you know that? No, you didn’t know that. OK. Did you know that the so-called anti-ballistic missile emplacements already completed in Romania and going into Poland now, have the same kind of holes that accommodate what Putin calls “Toe-ma-hawk”? Tomahawk missiles. Now, what’s the point there? Tomahawk missiles can easily strike the ICBM force of Russia and destroy the strategic balance. Is this a real concern of Putin? Of course it is! It’s been a primary concern for years, and he said so. Right now, he’s being heard, that’s different. Right now, he’s being heard, and there’s a concession on the table from Biden about not doing this in Ukraine. The discussions will go forward. I’ve been accused of being Pollyanna, and I don’t like that, but I don’t mind seeing some progress here. And of course, the main kibosh can be done by what I call the MICIMATT. There are very strong forces there in the military-industrial, Congressional, intelligence, media, academia, think tank complex. You notice there are parts of the government in there, right? Military, Congressional, intelligence? But in this case, oddly, it’s not the White House. So, the question for the next couple of weeks is, how soon will it become the White House, or conversely, how soon will the White House’s hopeful position descend under pressure of the MICIMATT? I’ll stop there, and thanks very much for letting me go on this long.

SPEED: Well, thank you very much, Ray. And I think you had a lot to say there that I’m sure Mike is going to have both responses to and maybe some questions about, too. Mike, of course, for anybody who doesn’t know, is the Asia Desk editor for EIR, but he’s also been spending some time interviewing some interesting people recently, and he’s pursuing that, as we’re doing our best to try to resurrect the lost art of evaluations. So, Mike, why don’t you go ahead.

MICHAEL BILLINGTON: Well, thank you, Ray. That was a most comprehensive and very powerful presentation. I think you captured the overall idea in a way which is going to maybe shock a lot of people, but I think also wake them up to the fact that you have to look at the world as a whole.

There’s a lot of people, very depressed, or somewhat pessimistic within the United States right now, about the idea that everything’s lost, our country’s going to hell, our cities are destroyed, the pandemic’s out of control, we’re threatened with thermonuclear war, and so on. But if you’re willing to look at the world from the perspective of the world as a whole, as Ray just did, then you have the ability to revive optimism in a population which has been purposely degraded by the media part of the MICIMATT, and by our government in many respects, to give them some optimism, that there is a way out; that in fact, there’s a way to stop this descent into a dark age, which clearly we are in—the threat of war, the pandemic, the cultural breakdown, the social disintegration within the United States and most of Western Europe. But, again, if you look at the world as a whole, if you look at who should be our closest allies, Russia and China, then you begin to get the sense, you can begin to get the sense that what we as individuals do at a moment of crisis like this, can have a huge, huge impact on the world.

I want to say a few things about what Helga and Lyn said in the beginning, but let me fill in a few pieces of what Ray McGovern just went through, from a few other, very prominent and knowledgeable intelligence people. There aren’t that many, so the few of them that there are, have stepped forward over the last few days, in a way which really does confirm the perspective that Ray just laid out.

One of them is a guy named Gilbert Doctorow: He’s a long, long-time analyst, somebody who’s worked in Russia and around Russia for many years, as well as on other sides of this. He attended the Russian press conference, after the Russia-NATO meeting on Wednesday [Jan. 12], and when he came out, there was an RT journalist who talked with him, and he said that the reason that the Russians deployed these forces on the border with Ukraine was provoked, first, by the fact that the U.S. and the British and others were sending modern missiles, modern weapons—not ballistic missiles, not intermediate-range nuclear missiles, but war-fighting missiles, Javelin missiles against tanks and drones to deliver bombs over the Donbas, that this was happening. And the way Doctorow put it, he said, they were concerned that some of the “hotheads” in Kiev would use this equipment with the mistaken belief that the Western powers would come and defend them militarily if they got into a war with Russia. In order to disprove that to these hotheads in Kiev, they deployed their forces to the border, with no intent to invade—they’ve made that very clear—but they want to do, as Doctorow put it, “flush out the reality” of what nations would come to Ukraine’s defense if they were stupid enough to get into a war with Russia. And it worked! One after another, the U.S., the French, the Germans, others, said, “No! If there’s a war between Ukraine and Russia, we’re not going to send troops, not one troop, not one soldier, not one boot will be on the ground” (although there are people there, training already, and there’s certain activities). But what they mean is that they’re not going to put their full weight into a war with Russia. They’re not stupid enough to fight a potentially nuclear war with Russia, over Ukraine. And in fact, they said so! They said, “If Russia invades Ukraine, we’re going to give them the toughest, most never seen before sanctions against them, it’s going to destroy their economy. It’s the economic nuclear option,” and so on and so forth, but not said was, “we’re going to send any troops, we’re not going to go to war.” And that, in fact, is what happened.

Now, another extremely competent analyst on this is a guy called Dmitri Trenin: He is Russian, who spent 20 some years in the Soviet army, at that time. And he’s now heading the Carnegie Institute in Moscow. So he went to work in something called the Moscow Institute in Europe, and then the NATO Defense College in Rome; but then he began working with the think tanks here in Washington, Carnegie in particular, and he’s now heading the Carnegie Moscow center, so it’s the fellow Carnegie Institute in Moscow. He’s in Moscow, he’s in the center of these ideas; he has a long history in the military.

And he gave an interview to Christiane Amanpour—I won’t characterize her; she’s with CNN. I think that’s probably enough to indicate her character. And she was trying to bait him and he generally made mincemeat out of her. She began by quoting the hardline positions that were being stated by Russia and by the U.S.; Russia saying, we absolutely insist on written guarantees, you must move NATO back to where it was before you expanded. The U.S. was saying, we didn’t give an inch, we’re telling Russia we’re going to really destroy them if they dare to invade Ukraine; and we will never say that we cannot expand NATO, and so forth.

But Trenin said: Look, they’re talking. This is the beginning, this is not the end. And when you talk about Russia going to war, he said—and I’ll read this—he said: “Putin is very careful in using military force. In Crimea, not a shot was fired. In Syria, professionals did the fighting, with few casualties. Kazakhstan is a victory. And they’re beginning to withdraw, today,” he said, which is true. They stopped a Ukraine, a Maidan from happening in Kazakhstan, because they quickly called in the collaborators to make sure that this thing was stopped in its tracks, this color revolution and outside terrorist operation, which burned down several government buildings, but tried to literally create a Maidan, and a coup was crushed.

He goes on: “This talk of war is on the Western side, not on the Russian side. There’s no feeling of impending war within Russia over Ukraine. Putin is using the troops as leverage, to get the U.S. to listen and to negotiate.”

And as Ray said, Putin is being heard. This is a change in the dynamic of European security development. Now, as Ray also mentioned, Blinken, just yesterday, Blinken and Stoltenberg talked, and they both incurred, indeed, as reported by Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, he said that both the U.S. and NATO are ready to meet again, to pursue diplomacy and reciprocal dialogue. So this is moving forward. And Wendy Sherman, who’s the official negotiator in these talks, talked with the head of the OSCE, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which includes Russia—it’s all the nations of Europe; she agreed with the current Secretary General Helga Schmid of the OSCE that this is a format to continue revitalizing European security dialogue, which includes Russia and all the other nations. So this is moving forward, no question.

Amanpour then quoted the U.S. bluster and Trenin replied, just straight out, “Get beyond the rhetoric. We know Ukraine will not be a NATO member soon, maybe never,” as Ray also said. “The simple reason, the U.S. will not fight a nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine. It is not in the U.S. interest to deploy intermediate-range missiles in Europe, since Russia could retaliate by deploying nuclear-armed submarines to patrol the Eastern seaboard of the United States.” In other words, they could put nuclear weapons, including their hypersonic weapons, which they have and the U.S. doesn’t, they could put them at the same distance from the U.S. cities, as the U.S. would be, if they moved their missiles up to the Russian border, and therefore, it is absolutely not in the U.S. interest to do that kind of thing.

Now, one other aspect of this I want to quote; this is back to Mr. Doctorow. The RT reporter asked him, “Why, now?” And Doctorow said, “That’s a question. Why has the media asked the ‘why now’?” Why didn’t Russia do this when they started moving their NATO forces east toward the Russian borders, starting, I think it was in 1999 was the first time. And Doctorow said, it’s very clear, you know, Putin gave a now very famous speech in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference, where he laid out precisely these issues of what is not acceptable to the Russians. But, at that time, the Russian economy was still in very precarious condition, and their military was not up to snuff, to put it nicely. Since that time, Gilbert Doctorow said, they have poured huge amounts of money, of brain power, of scientific and technological capacity into building their military, and they now quite rightly believe they have a military that’s equal, perhaps even in some areas like hypersonic weapons, the superior to the Western military powers. Therefore, they can do it. You can’t even pretend any longer that the U.S. is the only superpower, as we did after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s simply not true. You have China, as the by far the biggest and best economy in the world; and you have the Russia-China cooperation on both developing the third world. Russia is building nuclear power plants, and of course the Belt and Road is building nations, getting them out of poverty, getting out of the grip of the IMF/World Bank, by giving them infrastructure. So they were able to do it, because they now have the power to do it.

And the U.S. knows that. People, no matter how much they bluster, they know that they cannot fight a war against Russia, just like they cannot fight a war against China. The only danger, and it’s an extreme danger, is that you have some real madmen in the United States. You have Admiral Richard, the head of the Strategic Command, the guy who would actually push the button. Who said in February last year, that we used to think nuclear war was unlikely, but now with the rise of Russia and China, it’s likely. And this is madness, real madness. And you all saw, I’m sure, Senator Wicker, who literally, he’s one of the top guys on the Senate Armed Services Committee, openly saying we should prepare for a first nuclear strike against Russia: Madness.

So, could madness happen? Could we sleepwalk into a thermonuclear World War III? We have to be on guard. But, as Ray said, we have to look for the optimism where it’s there, because it’s our responsibility to push to make that happen that way, by making sure the American people do know what the American media is trying so hard to make sure you don’t know.

I want to say a few more words, in a sense go back to what you heard Lyn say, that when you have a crisis like we have today, you have to look at it in the context of an overall global crisis, an incident, which is not defined by what happened this week, or last week, but as a long-term process. And there’s no question but that this round of crisis started with the collapse of the Soviet Union, when we had a tremendous opportunity, when Lyn and Helga said: OK, we’ve broken the British Empire’s division of the world into East versus West, the free world versus the communists, and so forth. We’ve basically ended that. this is an opportunity to bring about a new paradigm for mankind, and they proposed that it be done by building high-speed rail connections between Europe and China, through Russia; that we create an environment in which we begin to work together as human beings and as sovereign nations committed to the idea that our sovereignty depends upon the sovereignty of the others, as we had in the Peace of Westphalia.

So, at that time, with the fall of the Soviet Union, some people, the neocons and others in the West thought, “we just won. We won the war. We won the Cold War.” It’s like Francis Fukuyama said, the neocon who wrote The End of History: Liberal democracy has now proven to be the superior means of running a nation, and it’ll be so from now and henceforth for the rest of time. History is over. We won. And then, just last week, Fukuyama looked around, and he said, I guess I look like a bit of an idiot when people see that I wrote that End of History back in the 1990s. So he wrote an op-ed, I think in the New York Times, which said, “well, you know, I guess I missed up some things. It didn’t occur to me that advanced democracies like the U.S. could collapse—didn’t occur to me. I thought, well, this is permanent, this is the rest of time.” And of course, what he sees as the collapse is January 6, last year, that this “insurrection” showed that our democracy has collapsed. So he’s really no different from the most wacko of the Democrats, who look at it that way.

But look at what Helga was discussing with the Peace of Westphalia. I won’t repeat what she said, but it was, in a sense, seen as the birth of the idea of sovereign nation-states, because it’s based on the idea that your sovereignty depends upon recognition and honoring the sovereignty of others, the “interest of the other,” that that was the basis on which this would take place. And the concept was somewhat built into the UN Charter.

It was emphatically adopted under something that the Chinese and the Indians first established: In 1954, Zhou Enlai from China and Jawaharlal Nehru from India, established what they called Panchsheel, or Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. And then, in the next year, in 1995, the famous Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which was the meeting of Asian and African formerly colonialized nations, meeting for the first time without their colonialist lords, and it was sort of the beginning of the Non-Aligned Movement. Part of the purpose of that conference was to prevent what was then an emerging threat of a war between the U.S. and China. And Zhou Enlai and Nehru and Sukarno, the head of Indonesia, were the key leaders—some from Africa and others from Asia—and in that they adopted officially these Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. And it’s worth thinking about what they are, because it’s really the nature of the Westphalia sovereignty idea and it’s the nature of the United Nations. The first, and you hear these terms, now, often, is: territorial integrity, that you have a sovereign nation. Nobody can move and take over your territory. Nonaggression, that you will not launch aggression against another nation. Non-interference in internal affairs, which of course is the daily fare of the U.S. intelligence community is interfering in other nations’ internal affairs. The equality of nations, the idea that you respect the sovereignty of the other, and cooperate with them. And then, fifth, the idea of peaceful coexistence.

So these ideas are the basis upon which we can, and we must establish a new security architecture, to replace NATO. As Helga said, at one point, they were talking about Russia being part of NATO, and perhaps NATO could have sustained itself by being a truly inclusive agreement amongst all of the nations of Europe; but that was undermined, and it’s now threatened. We need a new architecture based on this idea of peaceful coexistence. And it has to be driven, as LaRouche has always insisted, by that idea of economic development: That peace will only come through economic development.

We are now faced with both the complete breakdown of the Western financial system: Hyperinflation kicking in. To a great extent, the energy hyperinflation is driven directly by the adoption by the Western banking system of the Green New Deal, which is not something being run by AOC, or any of the silly children, running around screaming about the environment, or Al Gore and his fanaticism. It’s run by the banks. It’s run by Mark Carney, by the people who set up a banker’s cartel at the Glasgow climate summit, who explicitly said, we don’t believe governments are going to implement the policy of shutting down their fossil fuels in their economy, and therefore, we bankers will take upon ourselves, the moral responsibility to save the planet from carbon, by shutting down the world economy, and diverting every available penny into bailing out the bankrupt banking system, and funding the military buildup we need to enforce that.

So this is a moment of truth, where we can, and must, inspire optimism in people of the world, and especially the people in Europe and the United States who are drowning in pessimism and degeneracy right now. I think what Ray had to say, what some of these others, and what Lyn and Helga have to say is the antidote to the pessimism and the destruction of the minds of our citizens, that’s been so drilled into them over this systematic descent into a moral and cultural dark age. And, again, I say, we have every reason to be optimistic, and let’s pledge ourselves to bringing that optimism, while holding up the grave danger we’re in, a moment of crisis of whether civilization itself will even survive if there were to be a nuclear war, and yet, it’s precisely because it’s so dangerous that people are looking around; they know something’s gone horribly, horribly wrong. They’re looking for answers. They’re looking for who’s been telling the truth when everybody else was lying. Like what Ray said about the brilliant New York Times journalist.

I’m going to end by one short thing. This is the New York Times believe it or not [showing lead editorial, “Let Innocent Afghans Have Their Money,” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/opinion/afghanistan-bank-money.html]. But as you know, we’re having a conference on Monday, an emergency seminar on the extreme danger in Afghanistan, the fact that we have the threat of a genocide, as bad or maybe even worse, than Hitler carried out in his death camps and his wars—believe or not, the New York Times lead editorial this morning was “Let Innocent Afghans Have Their Money.” And the way it’s worded—I won’t go through the whole thing right here—but the way it’s worded, it’s clear that somebody at the New York Times realized that this genocide is so obvious, that if they don’t turn around from what they’ve been doing, which is peddling as they did with the war policy, the idea that we can and should punish the Taliban, they realize that this would be hanging over their heads. And somebody got through to them and said “You better turn that around.” So they did—not fully, not completely. It’s still somewhat self-serving. But they did note that if we don’t release the money that we’ve sequestered, if we don’t allow the central bank of Afghanistan to have their money, then we’re going to be faced with personal responsibility for mass murder, the mass murder of somewhere in the range of 20-24 million people, over this winter, where people have no money. And their editorial says “malnourished children with withered arms have been arriving at clinics in Afghanistan for months. Doctors, nurses, teachers and other essential government workers haven’t been paid in months and it’s not clear when they will. Targetted financial sanctions,” they say—of course, they defend their sanctions policies—“targetted financial sanctions are an appropriate and powerful tool to punish bad actors, and odious regimes. The mere threat of them can achieve results. But too often their cumulative effect over time is indistinguishable from collective punishment.” And of course, they’re guilty of collective punishment in case, after case, after case of these 20 years of mass warfare.

But nonetheless, they’re saying this has got to stop. They have excuses about why the Fed can’t release the money, but they say, we can get the money released from Europe and they interview our friend Shah Mehrabi, the former board member of the central bank in Afghanistan.

So things are moving: Our emergency conferences, our mobilization, our pulling people together on this Afghan crisis, our Committee on the Coincidence of Opposites, and the statement by Dr. Elders that humanity comes first in the case of Afghanistan, we have to release these funds and immediately launch a development program—this is having an effect. And again, there’s reason to be optimistic, if we’re willing to give our full heart and soul to this fight for the fate of mankind.

SPEED: Thanks a lot, Mike. And I’ll just say, to both you and Ray, I’ve gotten three questions which I’m going to pose. They’ll give us an arc of time, and Ray’s got something. Go ahead, Ray.

MCGOVERN: I just wanted to comment on one of the points that Mike made and that could be well elaborated on, because it’s the most important new factor in the equation: And that is, China. Now, Biden has had a bad experience. His advisers told him, before the June 16 summit that the Russians and the Chinese have this big, long border, and they have clashes on the border, and China’s so big that it must be threatening Russia. And so, what Biden said to Putin, and we know this, because Biden said this before he got on the plane coming home, “Russia is being squeezed by China. They have this long, long border, and Russia knows that China’s not only one of the biggest economic powers, but the biggest military power. So the Russians have a lot of cause to worry about China.”

Now, that’s 180 degrees away from the current situation. It might have been true in the textbooks that Jake Sullivan and Blinken read 40 years ago, but it’s not true now. Never! Never, ever have China and Russia been so close! So, consider Putin coming away from this summit, saying to his associates, “My God! These guys don’t know what end is up! They don’t know how strong we Russians really are—why? Because China will back us up! In the vernacular, China’s got our back! How do we show them that?”

Next summit, on Dec. 7, Putin reads Biden the Riot Act. He says: “You got our relationship with China completely screwed up. We’re very, very close. As a matter of fact, in one week I’m going to be talking with President Xi—tune in! Because you’ll see how close we are!” So, a week later, on Dec. 15, I think, there’s a virtual meeting between Putin and Xi, and they released the first minute of it, which was choreographed exactly the way the way they wanted it, and this is what happened. Putin: Thank you so much for the invitation to get together, and I just wish it were in person my good friend, because I look forward to meeting you in Beijing to begin the Olympics on Feb. 4. Then we will be in person and we can discuss things as we usually do. (Witness the fact, in parens here, that the U.S. had just declared that it would not go to the Olympics and it’s not going to have any official presence there and others followed suit.) What does Xi say? Xi says, “My friend, Vladimir Putin. This is the 36th time we’ve met, one-on-one, physically or bilaterally in the last couple of years. I look forward to these discussions. What I really appreciate is what you, Russia, have done to support our core interests. And also, you’ve been really good about preventing others from driving a wedge between Russia and China. Just be assured that we, China, will support your core interests, in the West, just the way you have supported our core interests here.” And then, Yury Ushakov, who’s the prime adviser to Putin, tells the press, “the way these two describe their relationship as something that exceeds, something that’s bigger than or higher than a treaty or a defense alliance, in terms of its closeness and in terms of its effectiveness.” It exceeds an alliance. I checked out the Russian and Chinese words, and that’s the word they used.

So, if Biden and his advisers, you know, he brought in the clowns, but at least they’re getting educated! If they didn’t get the message from that, they never—well, they did get the message from that. That was on Dec. 15th. When Putin insisted that Putin and Biden talk on Dec. 30th, Biden had been educated. And what Putin is really saying is, look, even your military I think should be aware of, or shy away from the prospect of a two-front war on opposite sides of the world. China’s got our back, and that’s real. Bottom line, here: What helped Putin to be so assertive, and his people like Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu? Well, because it really is two against one, now, unlike the situation that existed under Nixon, where we successfully played one off against the other. Then their relationship was very thorny. Now it could not be closer. And that’s not pretense, that’s real!

Now, one other thing I’ll just tuck in here, is that empowers what reaction our allies get when they make silly statements like German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who said: Look, you Russians are willing to use military force? That’s where we’re moving our troops up into Ukraine and elsewhere. And so, what did Shoigu say? He says, “You know, you’re probably too young to remember, but the last time German troops moved up to our border, it really didn’t end well, so, please go study your history.”

There is a new assertiveness. It’s well founded, and I just hope that those sophomores—or, they’re rising juniors now—that Biden has advising him will read more current textbooks, or maybe even some articles from you guys and from me. Thanks.

SPEED: I’m very glad you raised that, Ray. Actually, one of the first questions pretty much prompts that. I think before we go to this question, if we could show the map, and maybe either Mike or Ray will have a comment. This is a map of Kazakhstan, and the general area. I’m putting this up here, because of what you referenced concerning the issue of borders. It doesn’t show the whole Chinese border, but it does show something about an area people have just heard about in the world, and one of the things that should be noted is, Kazakhstan, and then you see Afghanistan on the map.

The question we have is about Afghanistan, and I’ll ask that, but I suspect either of you may have a more expansive answer. Let’s leave the map up, while I’m asking the question.

The question comes from one of our people, Anastasia, who reports: “Helga Zepp-LaRouche just had an awesome class and discussion”—this was during our meeting, as we began here—“with some 80-plus youth from around the world, who are ready to fight for Operation Ibn Sina. How can we combine the NATO/Russia crisis with the Ibn Sina initiative?”

Operation Ibn Sina refers to Afghanistan, and it’s an initiative that Helga has discussed concerning the possibility of addressing the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan from the standpoint of a new participation among the United States, China, Russia, and of course, the actors surrounding Afghanistan. You see there on the map: Iran on the west, Pakistan on the east; and then Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. But we’ve just heard on the news about Kazakhstan and what’s happened there.

I’ll say that the concept of what was being discussed about Operation Ibn Sina—Ibn Sina was a physician and philosopher, generally from Southwest Asia; the Afghanis claim him, the Iranians claim him, a lot of people claim him. But importantly, as a physician and as a great philosophical thinker, the idea was to invoke someone from the culture of the area, so that when talking about humanitarian relief, you’re invoking a person from the area itself. You’re not just talking about outside intervention, and more importantly, a new form of collaboration: This as a process of a new strategic alliance.

So, I just wanted that map up and whatever comment either of you could have, on what can be done on the Afghanistan situation. Mike why don’t you start, since we just heard from Ray?

BILLINGTON: Actually, I wanted to respond to Ray by addressing the Kazakhstan issue, because as Ray was making fun of the geopoliticians, including Biden’s gaffe about Russia and China, the Kazakhstan thing is being portrayed by many Western geopolitical writers as “Oh, China’s very worried about this, because Russia used this crisis to step in there, and now Russia’s going to be taking over an area where China’s got its interests….” and nothing could be further from the truth. This was another example of the extremely close cooperative operation between Russia and China—based on principle! This is what’s important, it’s not just alliance of nations ganging up against people they see as their enemies. The old British imperial idea, that when there’s three powers, in order to defeat one, you ally with your enemy, who happens to be opposed to another enemy; and then you crush them, and then create another alliance to crush the other. This is geopolitics: Constant conflict, zero sum game—which deny that there’s a common aim for mankind! The relationship between Russia and China right now is based on the principle of peace through development.

What happened in Kazakhstan? Remember that the Russians’ concern with the collapse of the occupation forces in Afghanistan, they’re working with the Taliban, but they’re not agreeing to recognize them because they have a very real concern about the existing al-Qaeda, ISIS type formations that still exist in Afghanistan, that they will come across the borders into the Central Asian countries.

What happened in Kazakhstan? They tried to run another Maidan, another 2014 Maidan coup, with different predicates, somewhat, but it was done based on an economic crisis. The National Endowment for Democracy spent $1 million last year; the George Soros Open Society Fund spent $3.5 million last year, organizing the NGO/color revolution forces, to go out in the street and create chaos over some economic or other slight. And that was done. But within about 48 hours, when they doubled the price of gas, and therefore, some of these Soros types came out in the street, you then had very highly trained, armed terrorists, some of whom came from Afghanistan, some from Syria, who intervened into the mobs, with high-powered rifles, with their private communication capacities; attacked buildings, attacked the media—they took over the TV stations; they took over the airport: This is what a coup does. They burned down government buildings. And President Tokayev responded, by immediately calling in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) forces, which includes strong forces from Russia. And the Russians immediately deployed significant numbers of forces, shut the thing down over just a few days.

Now, what’s going on in Kazakhstan: Kazakhstan is the key transport route for the New Silk Road. The Chinese already built a major pipeline from the Caspian Sea, right straight through Kazakhstan into China, which is delivering huge amounts of oil to China, so they have that to protect. Then when they decided to build their New Silk Road Economic Belt, the main route goes right through Kazakhstan on its way to Europe and Turkey. And they have a dry port on the border of China and Kazakhstan, which is an incredible place that takes 4,000 trains per year, now going back and forth between China and Europe, they go through the dry port, where they have to switch gauges; they have incredible mechanisms to move the containers from one gauge train to another in record time. So this is a strategically crucial part of the New Silk Road transformation of the economies.

And yes, there were difficulties in Kazakhstan, with a lot of corruption in the ruling circles around Nazarbayev, and other problems. But the point is, the potential for its development as a very lightly populated, but huge country, which also has Russia’s spaceport and it also has Russia’s missile training sites are in Kazakhstan. They have uranium that is processed in Russia, and then sent back to be turned into nuclear power fuel. These are totally Russia-China cooperative operations to transform the world, and especially in their neighboring areas.

Now, on Afghanistan: Of course, you also have the fact that the Uighur in Xinjiang in China—what people hear all the time is that the Chinese are committing genocide against the Uighurs. It’s such an abomination it’s almost not worth refuting: The Uighur population in Xinjiang has doubled; their standard of living has nearly doubled since China began focussing on developing the poorest parts of the country. And in lifting 700-800 million people out of poverty, a good number of those were the very, very poor Uighur people in Xinjiang, who have been lifted up, educated, given jobs, and this is called “genocide” by Mike Pompeo! They deal with their terrorist problem by educating and giving employment to the young people who otherwise are dragged off into terrorist operations, because the U.S. is dropping bombs on their mothers’ homes. I think that’s the proper way to see it.

But these networks came out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and there are still areas of terrorist training within Afghanistan. it’s not going to be cleaned up overnight, even though the Taliban is fighting them in most cases. So for both Russia and China, the issue of the Islamic movements within the Islamic culture are crucial.

Now, what has Helga done, by launching the Operation Ibn Sina? This is not something that came out of the blue. Helga’s studied this for many, many years, and has written extensively about the golden age of Islam. She’s written about Ibn Sina in particular, and she knows that he is a beloved figure in the Islamic world. My interview with Graham Fuller, the former CIA station chief in Kabul, and stationed all over the Islamic world, very much an Islamic scholar himself, made the point that there’s absolutely no reason that you could not have another golden age of Islam! It’s most likely going to come as part of what Lyn and Helga always argued, which is that you’re not going to have a localist renaissance any more. We have to have a global renaissance, in which each culture pulls out the best moments of its history. The Christian Renaissance, the European Renaissance, the Islamic Renaissance during the Baghdad Caliphate, the Confucian Renaissance during the Sung Dynasty; and similar things in Africa and elsewhere, this is what can and must happen. So this Ibn Sina project, of course, it’s aimed at stopping genocide in Afghanistan, it’s aimed and bringing modern health facilities to Afghanistan and in fact every nation on Earth. But it also is crucial to getting people to think in terms of why we, non-Muslims, have to understand who Ibn Sina was and is, today, to the Islamic community internationally, but also that we have to internalize that in our hearts, with the sense of the Peace of Westphalia, that we have to understand the Confucian Renaissance and Chu Hsi in the Sung Dynasty in China. We have to understand what went on during the golden age of Islam, and embrace it as part of what we do, by embracing the Platonic period and Augustinian era, and especially the work of Nicholas of Cusa and Schiller and Leibniz and so forth. This is the basis on which we have to look at every one of these crisis moments as a moment that can change history as a whole.

SPEED: Ray, if you have a response to that, and if you don’t, I have two questions for you.

MCGOVERN: Let me just make a quick remark and about the strategic significance of Kazakhstan. I think you’re showing that map was a really good idea. Not many people known where Kazakhstan is. Now they do. It sits atop the other “stans,” and needless to say there still is a terrorist threat as Mike has elucidated. And so, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is, that the border between Kazakhstan and Russia is—most people say—the longest contiguous border in the world. Look at it! It’s pretty ragged, and it goes for a long way.

Now, also look, in the middle on the left there, the Caspian Sea: What’s there? There are deposits of natural gas, that exceed by far all the oil deposits in Iraq in value. All of them. That’s where the TAPI pipeline was going to come from—Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India, and then out into the ocean. And who was going to take care of all of that? Enron! [laughs] That was a totally corrupt enterprise from the beginning, but that accounted in many ways for Bush Jr. and other interests in that TAPI pipeline—which never happened, of course.

But the riches there are incredible. Uranium? Mike mentioned that, which is incredibly important, for anybody who’s working with nuclear materials. So the strategic significance of Kazakhstan is in many ways more important than Ukraine in terms of natural resources; not in terms of strategic importance. But when people try to overthrow governments like that, the prompt response of the President Tokayev in Nur-Sultan, in getting the Russians in there, and then the naïve response from my friend Blinken—“Oh, once the Russians come in, you’ll never get them out of there!” Well, as Mike also mentioned, they’re out of there, or they’re getting out of there. So again, Mike is quite right in saying that is a success, that Russia can crow about. And they’re going to watch it very closely, because this in its own way is a very critical, strategic area.

SPEED: These will also be pertinent to you, Mike, and we also have a couple other maps to reference here. But the first question is from Cade, and it is: “Thank you for these wonderful analyses of the current situation. My question is to Mr. McGovern: It does seem we have moved a few inches away from a new Cuban Missile Crisis. The Schiller Institute’s interview with Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council Andrey Kortunov also pointed toward a trust from Russia put into Biden individually as a negotiator.

But what about the potential, let’s say, of a ‘new Bay of Pigs’? The prospect of rogue elements outside of Biden’s control, such as those training Ukrainian paramilitaries to ‘kill Russians,’ as Yahoo News reported yesterday, inciting either of the false-flag scenarios mentioned or any other operation?” So that’s one question.

I’m putting it together with the other question, for reasons of time, but also because they relate. The second question to both of you is from Kynan. He says: “It is quite a relief to hear that there were some positive developments from the talks that took place between Russia and the United States, and the fact that Biden has taken seriously Putin’s concerns about the deployment of nuclear weapons on Russia’s border, is important.

“This also coincides with another very significant development in which the leaders of the UN Security Council affirm that a ‘nuclear war could never be won, and therefore must never be fought.’ Why is it that the media aren’t actually reporting on these developments? What do they gain from portraying Russia in this malicious way, and by saying that nothing significant happened in these talks?”

MCGOVERN: The first question I discussed a little bit about these false-flag things, and these operations. You know, our intelligence services have lots of money, and if they don’t spend it, they won’t get as much next year. And sometimes there are cockamamie ideas, but they say, well maybe they’ll succeed and you get really fast promoted, so who’s going to be held accountable? It’s all secret, right? So, none of that can be dismissed. Is Biden fully in control? The answer is: No. If he told Bill Burns, head of the CIA, “you make sure that those CIA-nics don’t cause any trouble for us in the border area between Ukraine and Russia,” and Bill Burns said, “Yessir!” would they do it anyway? My guess is—of course, they would! Bill Burns is not in control either. The guys with the money are in control. And they have all these assets and they want to use ’em.

That’s the problem. And Putin knows that better than McGovern knows it, because he’s been kind of mouse-trapped in this way before, namely, the ceasefire in Syria, which blew up in the face of Putin and Obama, each, when the U.S. Air Force decided to violate it, a brief week after it had been concluded—after negotiations of 11 months.

The other thing here, is, OK, the UN Security Council: that was really nice. “No one can win a nuclear war.” Right. Well, that’s what Putin and Biden said at the end of their June 16 summit. They issued a statement, that’s the same as the one we remember with Reagan and Gorbachev: “No one can win a nuclear war…” That doesn’t really matter! What matters is what Mike mentioned before. Adm. Thomas Richard, who puts his finger on the button. He’s the Strategic Air Command, which used to be called “SAC.” Those guys are real patriots, and they’re not going to let the Russians do anything bad to us, and you know, Richard has never rescinded his notion that nuclear is probable. Has Biden told him to shut up? No, he hasn’t told him to shut up. And so, what is Putin looking at? He’s looking at a very, variegated command structure. In Russia, they have what they call “yedin nachaya” [ph]—leadership in one person. Everyone knows Putin is in control, and I think that’s a good thing.

In our country, well, you have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff telling the Chinese late the year before last, “look, if Trump tells me to take you out, I probably won’t do it” you know? What the hell is that?! I mean, it may have been a good thing in the vast scheme of things, but what conclusions do Putin and his Defense Minister Shoigu draw from this kind of, let’s call it, insubordination?

All I’m saying is, the situation is much more itsy-pitsy than anyone realizes. When you look from the Kremlin and you see, that despite all these statements, and they come fast and furious, the guys in charge—you know, if you read Daniel Ellsberg’s book on The Doomsday Machine, you’ll see that the executive authority to authorize nuclear weapons devolved into some of the smallest units you could ever imagine. I don’t know if it’s better now. But neither does Putin, and that’s the point: He’s got to be really careful.

SPEED: We may be dealing with one of that kind of Sterling Hayden/ Brig. Gen. Jack Ripper and Slim Pickens/Major “King” Kong! Let’s hope not! [referring to characters in Dr. Strangelove]

All right, lets again go the maps, but I want to have respond coming to the conclusion here. But let’s show three maps of NATO in 1990; this is 32 years ago, those were the NATO boundaries when the U.S. promised it would not expand one inch eastward from the German border. That was Secretary of State James Baker speaking to Gorbachev. All right, let’s go to the next one, NATO’s eastern boundary in 2019. Flip back to 1990 for a moment, and then 2019, so people can get the idea here. And then the third map is NATO in 2021, these are the proposed expanded NATO boundaries.

Let’s go to the final image, the larger map: This shows what is sometimes referred to as the “Eurasian Heartland,” but more importantly can assist everybody, having seen the map of Kazakhstan, having seen the map of NATO expansion, to get a sense of the entirety of what we’re talking about. There, you’re seeing the border between Russia and China, there in the east. This is what Biden was referring to. Of course, you see the border of Kazakhstan and Russia, which Ray just discussed a moment ago.

So, having shown these maps, here’s my question: How can people conquer the fragmented picture that is supplied by media and also supplied by bad education, to think about how these world leaders are required to think about strategic matters; what we are also talking about here as a higher security architecture, how would you approach that kind of thing? And how could we, as citizens think about this, or play a role in thinking about this in such a fashion as to call these people to account?

It’s a large question, but I wanted to put it out there, and let each of you give me a sense of it. Mike why don’t we start with you.

BILLINGTON: I agree, this is key. What Ray said a minute ago about the fact that the President doesn’t run things, is absolutely true. This was just as true with Trump as with Biden. Trump ordered the military to get out of Syria, and they told him to go to Hell. He said, we’re going to be friends with Russia, and they ran the Russiagate operation against him, and he basically capitulated. Same thing with China: He was friends with China, but then Pompeo and company made up the line about China gave us the coronavirus, and Trump needed somebody to blame or whatever reason. He clearly didn’t run things: he wanted to rebuild U.S. industry, but what did Wall Street do? They kept bailing out the banks. So he failed in everything he said he was going to do, which is why he was voted in by a population that was delighted to hear that we’re going to be friends with Russia, we’re going to rebuild the economy, we’re going to end these damned wars, we’re going to get out of the climate change hoax.

This is absolutely true with Biden. Is that reason to be demoralized? I must say, a lot of people I talk to feel demoralized for the reasons I was saying before: they think there’s no leader who can do anything. Well, in a sense that’s true. But I’ve talked about this before: LaRouche always emphasized the institution of the Presidency as more important than the President per se; that sometimes a President plays a crucial role in the institution of the Presidency, but, really, it’s the institution of those who are part of governing, including people in Congress, in the intelligence community, in the private sector, and individuals like Lyndon LaRouche, or Ray McGovern, who’s no longer official in a government agency. But, in other words, citizens who take responsibility for their nation and for the world: That really is the institution of the Presidency.

So what does that say to the American people? It says, it’s up to us! Like I said before, there’s a tremendous reason for optimism, in the midst of this descent into a dark age, that because it’s so damned serious, people are looking around for answers and for leadership. I’ve said, many times, when I first met Lyn in late 1971, he said people aren’t going to want to hear my warnings that Nixon’s pulling the dollar off gold and ending the Bretton Woods system is going to lead to depressions, and hyperinflation, and pandemics and wars. But when it happens, we’d better be there to lead, because people are going to look around for who was telling the truth, when everybody else was lying.

So this is a wonderful moment for the individual: I think it answers the question about the individual rights and the common good. You know, you have a horrible problem in America, where people think individual rights are the rights to be anarchistic, and say, “I refuse to do what I’m being told to do, because I’m American,” you know. Well, the importance of the individual is in their capacity to effect the Good. This is Platonism. This is the American Founding Fathers. And a moment like this, people have an opportunity to do the Good, which is to change the descent into Hell that the world is going through right now—the Western world in particular, and to act in a way that we make sure that this very interesting potential that’s emerged, that Ray and I discussed, coming out of this last week, that this does go in the right direction, that it does not collapse into Admiral Richard pushing the button. But that it’s going to depend, really, on us. You don’t get demoralized about the fact that Biden doesn’t run things: You take a good that he has put forward with Putin—largely because of Putin’s direction in this—but you take that as the basis on which, this is what we fight for; that’s what we fought for with Trump, that if he had succeeded in doing what he said he was going to do, he would have won the election with or without vote fraud. But he did.

And the same thing is true, here. We don’t just sit back and say, “Gee, I hope Biden can do it. We fight like hell to get the American people to understand that there is an opening here which is going to depend upon how the American people act, in conjunction especially with our friends in Russia and in China.”

SPEED: OK, fine. Ray?

MCGOVERN: Thanks, Mike. It’s been a pleasure to be one with you. I would my gloss on this, this way: things change. Maybe it’s an advantage being so old as I am, you see a lot of change. When I was working, as my first job at CIA as an analyst, it was to analyze the Sino-Soviet dispute, to convince people that the Chinese and the Soviets hated each other with a passion! And that we could take advantage of it. Now, I thought, and most of my colleagues thought that this would be forever the case, that they would hate each other from previous movies! They had irredenta, they had everything! And all of a sudden—not all of a sudden, actually; we watched it gradually dissipate, to the point where no two allies have been ever closer. And this is the reality.

So what am I saying? I’m saying that things change.

Now, I think we have to leave open the possibility, that people will change, too, and that there is a common enemy here. When the Chinese and the Soviets hated each other, the common enemy was the United States, but the United States took advantage of this. And now, the common enemy is twofold: climate change—I have ten grandchildren. I care about this!—climate change, and the pandemic. We have to do something about all that.

Now one has to allow for the fact that more progressive people, less bound to the MICIMATT, will eventually come to the fore and recognize that, you know, it’s over for all of us, if we don’t do something about climate change, and reining in pandemics. And then, then comes individual initiative, where people will come together, individually at first, but without fear and do what is necessary. I would finish with my favorite theologian, Annie Dillard, who said, “Who shall ascend to the mountain? Who shall do the work for us? There’s only us, there never has been any other.” So let’s put our nose to the grindstone. Thanks.

SPEED: And thank you, very much, Ray. I just want to say, also, at this point, this has been a particularly both stimulating and informative discussion. And it’s also important to say, and this explains why I’m saying this, that the opinions expressed here are not necessarily ones on which everybody agrees, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Let me repeat that: It’s going to be important, in particularly a United States that has become so sclerotic, that you rarely get a forum in which people can discuss ideas, that people get used to the notion of changing their view and of thinking about matters from a different standpoint.

It’s fine—well, it’s not so fine, but it can be tolerable, when people find themselves in what they call “factional positions,” but really, actually, a lot of these are a product of advertising, the product of media. They’re not even opinions that people have formed. I’m saying that for anybody who is watching right now, and also in the future, this is exactly what we all are trying to pursue at this point in our nation. It’s important to get a platform, whereby we can not only talk about these things, but recognize that in the dispute comes wisdom.

Dennis Speed — Moderator, Schiller Institute
Helga Zepp-LaRouche — Founder and President of The Schiller Institute
Dr. Joycelyn Elders — former United States Surgeon General
Marcia Merry Baker — Editorial Board, Executive Intelligence Review
Graham Fuller — former CIA Official and Islamic Scholar
Ray McGovern — Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA-ret.), Co-Founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Dr. Matin Baraki — Center for Conflict Research and the Center for Near and Middle East Studies, Institute for Political Science, Philipps-University, Marburg, Germany
Dr. Shah Mehrabi —  Member of Board of Governors of Central Bank of Afghanistan and Chairman of Audit Committee
Qasim Tarin — Co-founder, Unity and Freedom Movement of Afghanistan

As the year 2022 opens, let us, all over the world, turn our thoughts not only to Martin Luther King, but to his mission: the establishment of a “Beloved Community” of all mankind. We must come to realize that the greatest disease threatening humanity is “depraved indifference,” shown most spectacularly in the deliberate starvation right now, of millions in Afghanistan, “in the name of human rights.” Moreover, if you let such an injustice happen to others, the same injustice will sooner or later happen to you.

Nineteen people just died in a horrific fire in the Bronx, New York. There were over two dozen previously reported violations at that building. Among the dead were nine children. But hundreds of thousands of children are about to starve to death in Afghanistan. The cause of the deaths of innocent children in Afghanistan, and in the Bronx, is the same: the cause is a depraved indifference as to whether or not they either would, or should survive.

Once, nations aspired to prosperity for all citizens; it was called “the General Welfare, of ourselves and our posterity.” Now, because we refuse to stop Wall Street and the City Of London’s futile attempts to continue their bankrupt system, mass death beckons, daily, throughout the trans-Atlantic world. We are told that, regrettably, mass death will be “normal;” it will be “endemic” in the form of pandemics, or war, or “extreme events.” If that be so, that must be a direct result of our depraved indifference, because we could have treated the sickest in the world first, but instead chose not to do so, and still continue to choose not to do so.

We say “No!” to this pact with despair, and death. There is a plan, called “Operation Ibn Sina,” designed by the Schiller Institute, to resolve the injustice underway in Afghanistan, and by that means, create a united worldwide effort to roll back the glaring injustices in health care and other areas. Releasing Afghanistan’s $9 billion in funds is only the beginning.

Full transcript is available here.

Founder and President of the Schiller Institute Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote address to an international gathering of youth on the strategic importance of the great thinker Ibn Sina (980 A.D-1038 A.D) for humanity today. In the midst of a new, vicious humanitarian crisis striking Afghanistan, in which nation 22 million people exist on the verge of death by starvation, Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche is calling on youth to mobilize an international movement for a global renaissance of the highest ideas from every culture—those ideas that recognize the human individual life as sacred, in imago viva Dei.

Today we stand on the brink of hot war between the major powers, a situation made explicit in recent weeks by Russian President Putin and others, but ignored and distorted in the West. To advance a positive peace—a shared future among brotherly civilizations—let us advance the global understanding of Ibn Sina, a hero in the history of Afghanistan and one of the greatest medical scientists to ever have lived. Nations must now put aside geopolitics and join together to build the advanced medical and other critical infrastructure needed to defend lives and lift up all nations with a common mission.

Join Helga Zepp-LaRouche on Martin Luther King’s birthday, Monday, January 17 at 11am EST.

In reviewing the ongoing series of discussions this week between Russia, the U.S. and NATO — which she said so far “looks terrible” — Helga Zepp-LaRouche returned to what she described as the two alternative approaches to relations between nations. The Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I has in common with the posture of the U.S. and NATO today the view that the victors in war can dictate the terms of peace, as a unipolar force. This blatant assertion of world dominance ignores the legitimate wishes of other nations, and insists on their subordination to the unipolar power. This typifies the “arrogance of power” of today’s globalist war hawks, who claim the U.S. “won the Cold War”, and therefore has the right to be the dominant world power.

In contrast, the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648, was based on the idea that recognizing the “interests of others” is the key to a durable peace. The outright rejection thus far by U.S. negotiators of the legitimacy of President Putin’s security concerns will not be accepted by Russia. While it is better to talk than not, she said, the overall posture of the U.S. in these talks has “lowered the nuclear threshold”, making the use of nuclear weapons more likely should war break out.

NATO, which should have been dissolved at the end of the Cold War, must be replaced, especially since its present policy course leads to a war in which its members in Europe will be destroyed. Belonging to a security alliance which would lead to war doesn’t make sense. Demonizing Putin and attacking the Belt-and-Road Initiative when the western financial system is crashing also does not make sense. She concluded by calling on our viewers to participate in the emergency Schiller Institute’s online seminar on January 17, on the theme, “Stop the Murder of Afghanistan.”

Has there been any progress in the ongoing talks between U.S. and Russian reps?  The best that can be said is that it’s good they are talking, but statements issued by them show that the Russians have not received the agreement they are seeking, as the U.S. continues to insist it will not accept Russian “red lines” on NATO expansion and arms to Ukraine.  Meanwhile, the attempt at a “Color Revolution” coup in Kazakhstan has been thwarted by decisive action by the CSTO allies of the nation.  “Russia will not allow a ‘Color Revolution'”, Putin stated yesterday, after revealing that “Maidan technologies” — a reference to the methods used in the 2014 coup in Ukraine — had been employed in Kazakhstan.

HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger with the Schiller Institute and Executive Intelligence Review. It’s January 6, 2022, and I’m joined today, very happily, by Dr. Andrey Kortunov, the director general of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC). He’s been a participant at several Schiller Institute conferences. The RIAC itself is a very prestigious and important institute in shaping Russian foreign policy. We’re speaking at a moment of heightened tension between the U.S. and NATO with Russia, but also on the eve of a number of dialogues which have a potential for a breakthrough, and we want to explore this with Dr. Kortunov.

Andrey, thank you for joining us today.

ANDREY KORTUNOV: You’re welcome.

SCHLANGER: The tension that’s been growing in the most recent period can be traced back to the Dec. 3rd leak in the Washington Post, claiming that the Russians and President Putin are about to invade Ukraine. This has led to several discussions, two talks, in fact, videoconference talks between Presidents Putin and Biden. And there is a demand from President Putin that there be a discussion about legally binding agreements for Russian national security.

I’d like to start by just asking you, why do you think at this time, there’s been increased tensions? I don’t mean to say it just started Dec. 3rd, but we’ve seen a constant drumbeat since then.

KORTUNOV: Well, it’s hard to tell what exactly triggered the current escalation, but I think it was simmering for some time. If you look at the Russian side of the equation, of course, there has been a growing disappointment with the performance of the Normandy group, and I think that right now, there are very clear frustrations about the ability of this group to lead to the full implementation of the Minsk agreements. There were hopes when Mr. Zelenskyy came to power in Kiev, that he would be very different from his predecessor, Mr. Poroshenko, but at the end of the day, it turned out that it was more of the same. He introduced new legislation on languages, which implies naturalization of the use of the Russian language in Ukraine; he banned a couple of important and influential opposition media; and he prosecution some of Russia-friendly politicians in his country, so the perception was that probably we cannot expect too much from him.

Likewise, there was growing frustration with Paris and Berlin, in terms of their ability to use their leverage in Kiev to make the Ukrainian side implement the Minsk agreements. And an indicator of this was the publication of an exchange of letters between Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and his peers in Paris and in Berlin, a very unorthodox, unusual step for Russian diplomacy, which suggests that Russia cannot really count on Berlin and Paris as honest brokers in this context.

So, I think ultimately, the decision was made that we should bring it to the attention to President Biden, because President Biden might be a tough negotiator, but he at least delivers on his commitments. And Biden has demonstrated that he is ready to continue a dialogue with Moscow. They had a meeting with President Putin in June of last year in Geneva, and I think that the decision was made that we should count on the United States more than on our European partners.

This is how I see the situation on the Russian side. And of course, there are also concerns about what Putin called a “military cultivation” of the Ukrainian territory by the North Atlantic Alliance. Looking at the situation from Moscow, one can see that although Ukraine is not a member to the NATO alliance, but there is more and more military cooperation between Ukraine and countries like the United States, and Germany, and the United Kingdom, and Turkey, and that changes the equation in the east of Ukraine; and I think that the concerns in Moscow are that at some point, President Zelenskyy, or whoever is in charge in Kiev, might decide to go for a military solution of the Donbas problem, and this is definitely not something that Moscow would like to see. So in certain ways, the Russian policy in Ukraine is that of deterrence, to deny Kiev a military solution for the problem of the east.

SCHLANGER: Now, you wrote that you don’t believe that President Putin intends to invade Ukraine: That it would be an enormous cost to Russia, and that, in fact, sending troops to the border which was within Russia, may be in all this increased tension, may be designed to send a signal to the West—you just mentioned France and Germany. But do you think the West is getting the signal? Annalena Baerbock, the German Foreign Minister, was just in Washington and she and Blinken were rattling their sabers, a little bit, again. Stoltenberg of NATO continues to make very strong statements. Do you think the signal is being recognized, or it’s reaching the people that need to understand what President Putin is insisting on?

KORTUNOV: Well, I think that it really depends on how you define “recognition” of the signal: Because on the one hand, indeed, you’re absolutely right, we observe a lot of rather militant rhetoric coming from the West, and it is not limited to Washington and to Berlin only. We see some other Western countries, where they make very strong statements, denying Russian veto power over decisions that are made, or can be made within the NATO alliance.

But on the other hand, you can also observe that there is a readiness, at least, to start talking to Moscow, and this is exactly what Mr. Putin apparently wants. His point is that if we do not generate a certain tension, you will not listen to us, you will not even hear us. So we are forced to make all these noises in order to get heard, if not listened to. So they are ready to meet. I am not too optimistic about potential breakthroughs that can be reached within these meetings, but the idea to meet and to discuss a band of issues is already something that President Putin can claim as his foreign policy accomplishment.

SCHLANGER: Now, in the United States, the media are continuing to paint President Putin as an autocrat, Russia as authoritarian nation, and they’re sort of missing one of the broader points here, which is that we’re looking at something which could be described as a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis. And I just went through President Kennedy’s Oct. 22, 1962, where he made a point very parallel to what President Putin is saying, which is that no nation can tolerate offensive weapons that close to its border, as the Soviet weapons were to the U.S. in Cuba. Do you think this is something that is part of the consideration from the standpoint of President Putin and the Russian government?

KORTUNOV: Well, I think that, again, you’re right, here. I think that definitely President Putin implies that there are certain rules of the game, maybe not codified rules of the game, that should be observed. And I think that when we’re talking about the U.S. position, there is a standard U.S. feeling of exclusiveness—we can do it because we are good guys, so we cannot harbor any evil intentions, so our missiles are fine. These are peacekeeping missiles, they cannot constitute any threat to Russia or to anyone else. But if you guys put your missiles in the vicinity of our borders, since you are bad guys, it means your missiles are also bad, and that they should be removed. Of course, the United States pursues this policy of double standards for a very long time, and I understand why the United States is doing that, but I think that such double standards can no longer work in our world. So, if we agree that there should be some constraints, and that security interests of major powers should be taken into consideration, then it should be applied universally. It should not be applied to the United States only, but it should be applied to Russia, to China, to some other countries as well.

SCHLANGER: Now, you’ve spoken of your view that there needs to be a new security architecture, to replace the existing bloc structure which seems to be left over from the Cold War. Just a few days ago, the permanent five nations of the UN Security Council issued a statement, which I think was quite extraordinary, that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” which is an echo of the discussion between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev back in October 1986 in Reykjavik. Is this the kind of thing that can move toward a new security architecture, or recognition of something like this? And what kind of changes would you like to see, in order to create stability and ease the tensions?

KORTUNOV: Well, I would say that this is an important first step, and the question is whether this step will have any continuation. Because it is relatively easy, though it is difficult in itself, but it is, in relative terms, it is easier to make a general statement, without making any specific commitments, than to go for something more practical. I guess that one of the problems we see in Europe, in particular, is that NATO has monopolized the security agenda in Europe, and that implies that if you are not within NATO, you have no stakes in the European security: You are not a stakeholder. And if you’re not a stakeholder, you are tempted to become a spoiler. And that is something that I see as a major problem.

So, in my view, the key goal should be not to reverse the NATO enlargement, which is not possible, I think. But rather to deprive NATO of its monopoly position on European security matters. That might imply giving more power and more authority more inclusive European institutions, like the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), for example, which really needs some addition flesh on its bones. It has to be empowered, it has to become a real European multilateral organization that can take a part of the security agenda. There might be some other agreements, and some other arrangements that would diversify our security portfolio in Europe. But I think that definitely, any European system which excludes Russia by definition, is likely to be very—not very stable, let me put it in this way, and fragile, and it will have high maintenance costs. So, I think it’s better to have Russia in, rather than to have Russia out.

SCHLANGER: Now, in an article you wrote recently, “A Non-Alarmist Forecast for 2022,” one of the things you talked about is finding areas of cooperation. And you say one of the most urgent of these is Afghanistan for obvious reasons: the refugee crisis, the potential for radicalization of people if the humanitarian crisis deepens—as it is; David Beasley of the World Food Program just said yesterday, almost 9 million Afghans are at the verge of starvation. [https://russiancouncil.ru/en/analytics-and-comments/analytics/a-non-alarmist-forecast-for-2022/]

Do you see a potential, then, through the Extended Troika—China, Pakistan, Russia, United States—to do something? And as you know, Mrs. Helga Zepp-LaRouche of the Schiller Institute has called for an “Operation Ibn Sina” to use the healthcare situation as the basis for beginning, not just emergency aid, but building up a modern healthcare system in Afghanistan. Is this some area, where you could see some cooperation?

KORTUNOV: Well, Afghanistan strikes me as one of a very few places in the world, where I see no major contradictions between the East and the West, between Russia and China on the one hand, and the United States and the European Union on the other. I think that everybody around Afghanistan, and also if we consider overseas powers, everybody is interested in seeing Afghanistan as a stable place, as a place which will not harbor international terrorism, as a place which will stop being a major drug producer and drug exporter to neighboring countries: So these interests are essentially the same. I would definitely call for an as broad international coalition to deal with Afghanistan as possible; and this coalition should involve not only neighboring countries—which are clearly very important—but also countries which have the stakes in Afghanistan. We can talk about the European Union which remains the largest assistance provider to Afghanistan, even today; we can talk about the United States with its residential influence in Afghanistan; we can talk about Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, and the Central Asian states.

So I think the broader the coalition we have in dealing with Afghanistan the better it is, because it would mean that we have more leverage in dealing with the regime in Kabul and that also implies that we can agree on the red lines that this regime should not cross if it wants to maintain its international legitimacy.

So I think Afghanistan can be regarded not only as a challenge, but also as an opportunity for a multilateral, international cooperation. We can talk about the Extended Troika. We can talk about the SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization] as a platform to discuss Afghanistan. We can talk about other formats, but formats are just tools in our hands. The key issue is to agree on what we expect from the Taliban, and what we can give the Taliban in exchange.

SCHLANGER: Now, another area I want to take up with you is the Russia-China alliance. This is causing sleepless nights for a lot of the geopoliticians who see this as primarily a military alliance and it seems as though they’re ignoring the economic benefits of Eurasian integration, including potential benefits for the West. I wonder what your thoughts are on this? Is this going to continue the alliance, and is it more than just a reaction to the targetting of Moscow and Beijing by the Western war-hawks?

KORTUNOV: I think that these days, everybody is pivoted to Asia, Asia is becoming an important driver of the global economic development, and you cannot ignore China, no matter where you sit—whether you sit in Moscow, or Brussels, or in Washington, you have to keep in mind what’s going on in Beijing. So the Russian-Chinese cooperation has its own logic: We have arguably the longest land border in the world, and definitely, there is a natural complementarity of the Russian and the Chinese economies. Trade is growing pretty fast: I think if you take last year, it was about $140 billion and there is a lot of potential there. There are also common interests: there are interests that the two countries share in terms of Eurasia, and we discussed Afghanistan; definitely this is where Russian and Chinese interests mostly coincide. We can talk about the situation in Northeast Asia, and again, here, there is a noble effort for Russian and Chinese interests.

As far as the United States is concerned, I think definitely both countries are exposed to political and military and economic pressures from Washington. The Biden administration continues the policy of dual containment targetted as both Beijing and Moscow, and that is an additional factor that brings Russia and China closer to each other.

But let me emphasize once again that the Russian-Chinese cooperation has its own dynamics, its own logic and this logic does not depend fully on the position of the United States though this position is important for politicians both in Russia and in China.

SCHLANGER: I want to come back to the P5 statement on not fighting nuclear wars, because we’ve raised this before in discussion with you: President Putin in January of 2020 proposed a P5 summit, so that it’s broader than just the United States and Russia. Do you still see this as a venue that would be an appropriate one for taking up some of these broader issues?

KORTUNOV: I think it would be important, at least, in order to reactivate the United Nations Security Council. Because unfortunately, we see on many important issues, the council cannot really deliver, because there are very clear disagreements between its permanent members and that prevents the council from taking a consolidated action. So I think if they discuss some of the regional issues at such a meeting; if they discuss issues like nonproliferation, or the fight against international terrorism, or let’s say, energy or food security, that would be helpful. Of course, the P5 cannot decide on every single international issue. They cannot resolve all the global problems without participation of other states, but you have to start somewhere, and maybe a P5 meeting, face to face hopefully, will be this important starting point. If it is successful, then we can complement it with other formats, for example, when we talk about the economic dimension we can do a lot within the G20 framework, and that should complement the efforts of the Security Council. Some issues can be discussed in the framework of bilateral U.S.-Russian negotiations, some of them will require multilateral discussions, in multilateral formats.

So formats might be different. The question is whether they have the political will to pursue this agenda, whether they are ready to go beyond their conventional wisdom and think strategically.

SCHLANGER: And on this question then of bilateral discussion, do you think there’s a prospect for progress on nuclear arms discussions in the year ahead?

KORTUNOV: I think that if there is a will, there is a way, of course. But it will be an uphill battle for both sides, because it’s not clear what we could have after the New START agreement expires in about four years from now. The arms race is changing. It’s no longer about numbers, it’s no longer about warheads and delivery means. It’s about quantity, it’s about precision, it’s about prompt strike, it’s about autonomous lethal weapons, it’s about cyborgs, it’s about space, and we still have to find ways to counter these very dangerous, destabilizing trends in the nuclear arms race. On top of that, we have a very serious problem of how to multilateralize strategic arms control, because the lower we go—I mean “we,” the United States and Russian Federation—the lower we go, the more important nuclear capacities of a third country become, and we have to engage them in this way or another into the arms control of the future.

So there are many issues here. I will say I’m probably pessimistic about the future of arms control, but it will require a lot of commitment, a lot of patience and a lot of stamina.

SCHLANGER: Somewhat pressing right now, which is the situation in Kazakhstan: We were talking last night, given the upcoming meetings and the potential for a breakthrough, that maybe we should be watching for something coming out of the blue that could be a destabilizing influence. And there are elements of what’s happening in Kazakhstan which are coherent with what we’ve seen with color revolutions in the past, including Western intervention into the affairs of other countries. Do you have any reading on this? Any thoughts on that?

KORTUNOV: Well, it’s hard to tell. It’s probably too early to jump to conclusions, because of course, there will be people in the West who would applaud the kind of developments in Kazakhstan. At the same time, for instance, if you look at large American oil and mining companies, they had a pretty good business in Kazakhstan, and they cannot be interested in a political destabilization there. So I’m not sure that the United States has been directly involved in staging a color revolution in Kazakhstan. But definitely, there are some external players, that might be interested in turmoil and mutiny in Kazakhstan. Having said that, I should underscore that there are some fundamental domestic roots of the problem: Definitely the leadership of the country was too slow to react to the social and economics demands of the population. They promised political reforms, but again, they dragged their feet on this issue, which triggered the events that we now observe.

I can only hope that everybody will learn appropriate lessons. The state authorities should learn how important it is to keep an eye on the changing moods of society, and protesters should also learn that the borderline between peaceful protests and violent extremism might be murky. We now see that already hundreds of people, unfortunately, were killed in Kazakhstan. There were many cases of looting and vandalism, and definitely this is something that has to be stopped.

SCHLANGER: Well, Andrey, thank you very much for your time and joining us today.

KORTUNOV: Thank you.

SCHLANGER: As these meetings take place and we see new developments, I’d like to be able to have an opportunity to speak with you again and see how these things are moving.

KORTUNOV: My pleasure, thank you.