Reprinted with permission from the The Realist Review, James Carden’s Substack.
The indefatigable podcaster and author Scott Horton wears many hats. In addition to his role as Director of the Libertarian Institute, he hosts the Scott Horton Show and is the author of the new book, Provoked, which is a comprehensive account of the Second Cold War between Washington and Moscow.
Horton and I spoke a day after the historic phone call between Presidents Trump and Putin which resulted in a limited 30 day ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
~ James W. Carden
Carden: So I guess the first thing that I’d like to ask you is: How many interviews have you done for the Scott Horton Show?
Horton: I’m at 6,100 and something now…
Carden: How did you get into this business?
Horton: It was really Iraq War II, I guess, which made me decide that essentially what we now call podcasting was my comparative advantage. So at the time I had a pirate radio show on 95.9 FM Chaos Radio in Austin, which was basically my punk rock friends. I started the weekend interview show in 2003, and I would save up the interviews and post ’em online. I had one friend that really convinced me, man, you got to post all the interviews that you do on the internet. And another friend who said, I’ll give you a computer if you promise me you’ll use it.
So I was like, all right.
Carden: So you were podcasting before it was ‘a thing’?
Horton: Yeah, it’s funny, I was really late at finally giving in and adopting internet technology. I really was just reading books and the Times and the Journal and driving a cab. But my friends basically insisted, if you’re going to do this interview show, you have to also make it an internet show. So that was really the genesis of that. And then I obviously was palling around with the guys from antiwar.com because they were the most brilliant geniuses in the world. So my first interview was with the great Alan Block. He’s a wonderful guy.
Carden: And then eventually you founded the Libertarian Institute…
Horton: Yeah, that came much later. In 2016, I founded the Institute with Sheldon Richmond and Will Grigg, who unfortunately died not too long after that.
Me and Sheldon have kept it going, and he’s the executive editor and I’m the director, and I’ve now got 25 guys and just tons of the best writers and podcasters. We’ve now published 16 books going on, 17, 18, 19, coming up here real soon, including the very best book you ever read about the origins of Obama’s dirty war in Syria back 10, 15 years ago. That’s just going to blow everybody’s socks off by William Van Wagenen.
And so yeah, the Libertarian Institute is going really well. It happens to be our fund drive right now in case any very wealthy people are reading this… [You can donate here: https://libertarianinstitute.org/donate/ ].
Carden: So you then branched out into authoring books. So the first one that I’m aware of was Enough Already, which was a terrific book about the global war on terrorism… And the newest one is Provoked about the war in Ukraine and the new Cold War.
And so I wonder if you could talk about the genesis of Provoked. This is, I mean, an enormous achievement. When did you start writing it—and was there something in the process of writing that surprised you that you didn’t know already and that you found particularly interesting?
Horton: Okay. Well, first of all, the book started as a speech that I gave 2 years before this phase of the war kicked in. And it was titled The New Cold War with Russia is All America’s Fault. And it was a speech I gave to the Libertarian Party of Kings County, Washington on Leap Day 2020, the day that COVID hit Seattle.
I was there giving an anti-war speech, and it was also the same day that Trump signed the deal with the Taliban to get us out of Afghanistan.
So that was when I decided to essentially flesh the thing out. It was supposed to be a short little monograph – first to market explaining what’s going on there. The speech is already written right? But then, well, Ben Abelow (author of How the West Brought War to Ukraine) beat me to the punch.
And I originally had a co-author and the thing just grew to extraordinary lengths. I basically stopped writing at 1400 pages and decided that, boy, I just better stop now.
I guess the reason I chose to write it is I think that there are so many great writers on this issue, but I think my comparative advantage is in being able to tell one story all the way through over 30 or 40 years and show how one thing led to the next.
Not that I’m really an economist, but it is sort of an Austrian economic analysis of the war, basically just from the point of view of the economics of bureaucracy that what happens in government is they fail upwards and they never want to solve the problem that they’re created. If they did, they would be out of a job. The GI’s in Vietnam coined a term for the Army—they called it the self licking ice cream cone— meaning that the army is its own justification for its own existence and it needs something to do.
The Terror War, of course, kind of looms in the background of the new Cold War with Russia because America kept using the Bin Laden-ites, not just in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the Eighties, but in Bosnia in the mid-Nineties, in Kosovo in the late-Nineties, and as well as in Chechnya in the late-Nineties, and into the 2000s, Washington kept using the bin Laden-ties even after they were attacking us and slaughtering American civilians.
The US government kept using them as long as the Serbs or the Russians were the enemy – that was good enough for them.
Carden: And the common thread, of course, is Russia. They liked the Chechen terrorists because the Chechen terrorists were terrorizing Russia. And so what you have at the beginning of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is, and people forget this, is that Putin was the first world leader to call George W. Bush after 9/11. The Russians were very cooperative in allowing us to set up our bases in Central Asia. They worked with us to set up the Northern Distribution Network to supply our forces in Afghanistan. All this gets forgotten. And during the period from the GWOT in 2001 to the Maidan in 2014, we managed to turn Russia from a potential friend into an enemy. And it seems to me that that’s one of the great tragedies of this period.
Horton: Absolutely. And it’s because they simply were not willing to share decision-making authority with the Russians. And they said plainly, they actually had deceitfully promised the Russians at the end of the Cold War that they were going to turn NATO into a political organization. This goes on even through the ‘W.’ Bush years.
There is no enemy, so don’t worry, Russia, you will be part of the same security partnership with everybody else. And the Eastern European nations and Russia will all join together, just like they were already in the CSCE [Commission On Security And Cooperation In Europe]. William Perry, who had been Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton said, if we’re going to expand NATO, we ought to bring in Russia first and then the Eastern European nations after that. That way we make it clear this is not an anti-Russian alliance because then we’re just continuing the same Cold War we already won. We don’t want to make that mistake.
Carden: NATO expansion is also a story of the power of domestic lobbies in this country. A certain Middle Eastern lobby gets all the attention, but there is also what I call the Captive Nations lobby. And Ambassador Jack Matlock has pointed out that in the Nineties, the motive for the Clinton administration in expanding the alliance to include Poland, Hungary, and then later the Baltic states was domestic politics. And he was told that Clinton needed these votes in the Midwest to win in ’96…
Horton: Yep. Lockheed dollars and Polish votes.
Carden: That’s right.
***
Carden: So the name of your book is Provoked. When did the provocations begin? They seem to have begun really soon after the end of the first Cold War…
Horton: Yes, absolutely. Scholars that I cite demonstrate that the HW Bush administration was lying to the Soviets. They knew that they were going to not just keep NATO, but they were going to expand it, and they knew that they were going to keep it a military organization – it’s the heart of American power in Europe.
As for Russia, they’ll never be allowed to join because they’ll just be too independent and disagree with us about too many things. And so we’re not going to do that. But they told the Russians otherwise, they emphasize to Gorbachev and then to Yeltsin, and then later even to Putin, that we’re going to use either the CSCE, which later became the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe ], and then later the PFP [Partnership for Peace] to replace NATO.
And so the Russians were told, you won’t have to worry. NATO will essentially be like the EU plus America, a political organization that we use to sort of promote democracy and American economic interests or whatever, that kind of thing, but nothing for you to worry about.
And they knew that they were lying the whole time. And that’s the point – the official policy was to just shine them on. And then they said, look, if expansion causes a negative reaction, there’s always NATO. So they know what’s going to happen.
They fulfilled their own prophecy: If we get a bad reaction, at least we have an expanded military alliance to deal with it.
And this is something that Pat Buchanan said in 1999: Are we really serious about sending American forces to potentially fight a nuclear war in order to guarantee the independence of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia? Are we really going to guarantee the independence of these countries with a real war guarantee or is it just a bluff?
It’s really not a good idea to make promises like this that you’re not willing to keep…
The point is, we shouldn’t be passing out these war guarantees at all if we’re not really serious about enforcing ’em, and we should not be—I’m all in favor of Baltic independence, but I’m not willing to die for it.
Simple as that.
Carden: So fast forward to 2014 and the Maidan and the US foreign policy elite thought that the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Kiev was something to celebrate. Victoria Nuland bragged shortly after the event that the US had spent something on the order of $5 billion since the end of the Cold War to bring that result about – it seemed to me at the time to be a foolhardy thing because it was easy to see that the Russians were not going to react well to the overthrow of a government on its border that was friendly to it, which was replaced by what Moscow viewed as a regime of far-right Ukrainian nationalists who were hostile to it.
But you get the sense that Americans don’t really understand that backstory. Instead we’re told over and over again that it’s a war of good versus evil. It’s about Ukrainian sovereignty. We can’t reward Russia for invading another country and changing the borders of its neighbors…
Horton: Well, it goes to the title of the book, Provoked. I didn’t choose that title because I’m trying to justify what the Russians have done. It’s instead a direct counter to the American propaganda line, that this was an unprovoked attack. Over and over we are told it was an unprovoked attack, an unprovoked attack. Like we’re supposed to be hypnotized and repeat that over and over… Of course, they call it unprovoked because they provoked it.
The fact that America has this massive presence in Eastern Europe, right? That ought to be the clue as to who is instigating what here. And as you indicate, the war has been going on since 2014, but the Russians escalated it severely in 2022, essentially trying to force a deal.
Carden: I think of this war as maybe the most easily avoidable war in history. I mean, the Russians sent over a draft treaty two months before they launched the full scale invasion, basically outlining what they had been saying for 10 years, which was, we require Ukrainian neutrality. We don’t care if the Ukrainians join the EU, for instance…
Horton: And these are their demands right now even though they’re in the position of strength on the ground…
Carden: So you have the same demand today as you had in December of ’21. Now, what happened in the interim is that nearly a million people have died…
Horton: And Ukraine has lost a ton of territory that they’re not getting back…
Carden: And the country is a rump state, and the population is probably half of what it was when it gained independence in late 1992.
Horton: Remember the Russians have created more problems for themselves, for example, by drawing the line where they’ve drawn it, they’ve essentially removed the entire pro-Russian leaning population from Ukraine and made it part of Russia leaving, as you called it, a rump Ukraine that will forever be dominated by right wing nationalists from the far west of the country without any kind of real counterbalance there – leaving the people east of the Dnieper River who are still predominantly Russian speaking somewhat at risk, even if they’re still loyal Ukrainians under Ukrainian sovereignty, they will be at risk of being persecuted by the new Galician fascist regime, which is almost certain to be run by people like Andrei Biletsky, who is still the head of the antisemitic AZOV brigade.
So it makes sense then from the Russian point of view to keep going to solve that problem too. I hope that they don’t do that, but they have left themselves in an otherwise dangerous situation…
Carden: Yeah, I think one thing to note would be that that’s an eventuality that the Russians did try to avoid with the Minsk process. From 2015 to the 2022 invasion, they had tried via Minsk to keep Donetsk and Luhansk within Ukraine, but with some measure of autonomy…
Horton: That’s such an important point about their motive. It wasn’t that Putin was some angel. It was that he had an interest in leaving the Donbas as part of Ukraine…
Carden: But now they’re going to face an implacably hostile far right rump state that, also thanks to the Biden administration, is now going to be a black hole in the middle of Europe. It’s going to be an open air arms bazaar, and it’s going to pose real security challenges to the rest of Europe. But these things were not thought through during the Biden administration, and I think it really shows you just how inept and sinister their policy was over the course of the last three and a half years when Trump can come in and put a New York real estate developer in charge of negotiations, and within two months have some sort of outline towards a deal. I mean, it’s really quite remarkable. What are your thoughts? What are your thoughts about what went down yesterday with the Trump-Putin phone call?
Horton: Well, I’m all in favor of the talks. It goes back to your earlier point about how the Biden administration could have negotiated their way out of this before the war ever broke out. Their policy was to threaten Russia that you better not do it, and if you do, we’ll arm Ukraine. But they refused to negotiate in good faith over any of it, even though negotiations over the primary sticking points, Ukrainian membership in the NATO alliance, as well as the potential stationing of American missiles in Ukraine, had both been forsworn by the Biden administration.
Of course, the other major sticking point was the ongoing civil war in the east of the Ukraine, which of course, if the Americans had been willing at all, they could have leaned on Zelensky to put an end to his side of that, and they could have quashed that.
On Piers Morgan today, I told the former British MI6 officer, Christopher Steele (author of the notorious and fabricated “piss-dossier”), that if it hadn’t been for him and his co-conspirators framing Trump for treason eight years ago, he could have solved this then. But Trump was falsely accused of treason to prevent him from being able to have his own Russia policy and make peace with Russia and settle the conflict in Ukraine.
And his ambassador even directly intervened against the German foreign minister when he proposed a formula in 2019, for implementing a new order of operations, essentially for implementing Minsk 2 that hopefully everyone could agree on. Trump’s own ambassador told him, don’t sign that.
They weren’t willing to negotiate to prevent the war. They wanted the war, and after the war began, they, again, scotched peace negotiations in Belarus and then in Turkey, and prevented Zelensky from signing an early end to a war in which they only would’ve lost Donetsk and Luhansk – instead they kept fighting at American insistence to keep the war going. And you’re right, there was no plan to end the war. The plan was to keep the war going as long as they could, as they put it to weaken Russia. And yet, from the very beginning, it was clear that their policy was not working. I mean, obviously the Russians are being forced to spend a lot of money on this, but much less per body than the American side.
And overall, their economy is not broken, their currency is not crushed. They’ve expanded their trade with the rest of Asia, and essentially they have not been strategically weakened. If anything, it’s America and the West that have been weakened, while Russia’s position has been strengthened and their alliance with China tightened and all of the rest.
So it’s just like you would expect: Biden’s policy resulted in catastrophe. Just take one look at the guy. He couldn’t possibly know what he was doing.
James W. Carden is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.
