OK, people, buckle your seat belts, don't panic if the oxygen masks drop, there will be turbulence. I'm dropping the hammer, no, the entire anvil on this one. Every time the MSM or even these war-mongering governments mentions Russia and Ukraine, they MUST say these words: "since Russia's full-scale invasion..." If it were a full-scale invasion it would look like Gaza by now.
You even have supposed progressives such as Yves Engler stating over and over things like: "Russia's war in Ukraine is illegal and brutal (even if NATO expansion, foreign-promoted ouster of President Vicktor Yanukovich and other moves contributed to provoking it)." And if you read that speech from Sergey Lavrov and accept his version of events, you will be accused of promoting Russian propaganda. But here today, I have a transcript from an interview of former Ambassador Jack Matlock, giving essentially the same story, or perhaps even more negatively to The West. He is NOT mouthing Russian propaganda!
Yes, people keep going over these same points as the cause of the war in Ukraine - the Maidan massacre and coup, switching out the elected president, Russia's security concerns, etc. Don Hank in today's post replays his April 1, 2023 post showing the injuries to the Russian-speaking people of the Donbas, who suffered massively from bombing the shelling by the Kyiv regime. Over 15,000 people were killed and I don't know how many with serious injuries, you can see their scars in that video. They ASKED for Russia's help to save their lives! So that's another reason for Russia's "unprovoked attack." But never just look at the surface - the evil Empire lurks in the depths.
Events appear that seem random and the MSM lets them go by like that. Ansar Allah strikes refineries in KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia). KSA asks the U.S. to hit Yemen, but they say no, we would only supply intel. Random acts? No, they are all tied together in Bessent's grand strategy to damage China via his biggest currency short ever, via a petroyuan trap.
Going back to Ukraine, remember the "Pivot States" article. And now think about how Russia was tricked into invading Afghanistan. And don't let your AI Cowork tell you this isn't true, Brzezinski jumped for joy when informed that Russia had taken the bait and invaded Afghanistan. Now I see a pattern there, from that situation, to this Ukraine action, where the Kyiv regime was deliberately killing the people of the Donbas, banning their religion and language, essentially a genocide. I see this as the same game being played out, to trigger a response from Russia, which would NATURALLY be labelled as an aggression! Am I saying the Empire would slaughter those people to trigger a Russian invasion? Does Bessent give a damn if KSA collapses, or Europe faces energy shortages this winter so that he can break China?
ENOUGH of the propaganda, already!
And what just happened at NATO? They sent out a memo to all members to arm up for their glorious war against Russia, and build deep bunkers for your leaders, because, after all, a government's main objective is to endure at any cost. FAFO.
Here is the Matlock interview:
PASCAL- Welcome back to Neutrality Studies.
Today with a very special episode because we have back again
Ambassador Jack Matlock, the United States' last ambassador to
the Soviet Union.
JACK- Ambassador - I was not actually the last. You might want, I know, people have said that, but no, I was succeeded by somebody else who was there for just a few months before the Soviet Union collapsed.
PASCAL- That is right, you went back to the US in in August '89, right?
JACK- And that's right. I left in August and Strauss was named and he came in September and of course then the Soviet Union broke up in December and he became ambassador to Russia.
PASCAL- Okay. So if I in the future if I introduce you as the last full ambassador as in who served his entire term that would be technically correct would it...
JACK- Well, or all right, we leave that one aside.
PASCAL- Ambassador Matlock, I really wanted to get an update with you in order to hear also your assessment about where we are in the world in 2026 after four and a half years of the war in Ukraine and in something which some people by now are describing as you know an in-between period between two orders. Do you see it like that or how do you understand the current situation of the world?
JACK- Well, I think that we got off course in our foreign policy starting in the 1990s and we had ended the Cold War and actually had Europe united in 1992.
And I think that the decision made later by at that time the Clinton administration to begin expanding NATO and also to fail to reach a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, something that there seemed to be hope in the early '90s.
And yet the inability of the Clinton administration then to insist that Israel continue on that course of negotiation. Those two things I think started us on the situation we are now. But and on the expansion of NATO, NATO had been organized as a defensive alliance.
But once the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War was over, when you started expanding it, it became an offensive alliance. And if you leave Russia out, something we should not have done, then you create a security threat to Russia.
So that that has now resulted in the very destructive war in Ukraine. And of course things in the Middle East have gone from bad to worse with the current war against Iran which is creating violence and things throughout that area.
Meanwhile, we see in the Pacific worry about the increasing power of China. But I would have to say that I don't think China has been threatening others militarily.
There is the worry that they might invade Taiwan, but in terms of military action against others, you just don't see it. And so I think the problem now has been instead of using the peace at the end of the Cold War, to lead the world into peaceful settlement of disputes.
I think you know the United States hasn't really started you might say these problems, they have risen out of local circumstances but trying to go in and support one side of the other militarily I think has involved us and has not brought about the sort of peaceful world and this is happening within the context now of the ability of humankind I say, to commit suicide. In effect, we have known that that was possible once nuclear weapons reach the quantity that they are, if they were ever used all of them or even partially it could literally make the planet uninhabitable.
And so this was something that preoccupied us when we were ending the Cold War and we thought we had those things under control. But beginning in this 21st century, the United States walked out of most of these arm control treaties. And now with the violence in Ukraine, one which is the Europeans and the United States are directly involved in supplying arms and munitions, they're against a nuclear power, I think really raises questions.
But beyond that as we see the development of artificial intelligence there are real dangers there and not necessarily that the artificial intelligence is going to turn against mankind but the thing is it is going to empower people including, I would say, even smaller groups of people, not just nation-states to develop highly destructive weapons. I mean, you could have small groups or even individuals developing diseases for which we have no vaccination or combined or in many other ways. you will find that this for example allows adversaries to attack the infrastructure of other countries and often without ability to track to make sure who is doing what, it can bring real chaos to the world and this is developing very past and at a time we seem to be fighting each other over all sorts of things and attempting to punish countries that do things we don't like with economic sanctions. And I think that this is not working and is creating a more and more dangerous world.
PASCAL- You know, the way I completely agree with what you said and the way that I see how countries can impact other countries is that you have military power that can work on what other countries can do to you, what adversaries can do to you. And we have diplomacy, which usually works on what other countries want to do to you. And the big question in my mind is why is it that at the end of the Cold War, the way you also described it, and the way you directly worked on ending the Cold War which was a deliberate decision as you said before that, that changed the want -there was no more want to oppose each other. The aspiration was to work together. How did we go from there to a moment where it seems that both sides and especially the Europeans have such a visceral hate for Russia and want to destroy Russia and want to have adversarial relationship? How, and on top of that, how would we rekindle it back into a cooperative situation where the where the idea of coexistence becomes a thing again? Because right now this is gone. The idea of coexisting with Russia, at least for the Europeans, is completely utterly gone. And the question to you as a great diplomat is like how do we recreate that kind of environment?
JACK- I think that number one, there was a widespread misunderstanding of how we ended the Cold War. We begin to talk about it as if it was a defeat for the Soviet Union and a defeat for Russia.
And first of all, let me say that the Soviet Union was not Russia of today.
Too many people today that talk about Russia do that. And formally speaking, the Russian Federation was part of the Soviet Union, which was a communist empire much more than a Russian empire and one in which Gorbachev tried to change. He was, I would say genuine, he became by stages a genuine democrat in the sense that he was trying to create a more democratic system and as a leader of the communist party he was able to take it out of complete control of the country but then things got out of hand, but anyway we ended the Cold War by negotiation and it was to the advantage of everybody. There was nobody defeated and we were able to do it because Gorbachev changed the basic philosophy of the Soviet system.
Its foreign policy had been based upon the Marxist idea of class struggle, and that it was the duty of the Soviet Union to support revolutions in other countries to bring about what they call socialism which would develop into communism.
You know, Marx, I think, did a very accurate estimate of the operation of capitalism at the time he was writing, where he was off base totally was the predictions that he was making. And this frankly is true of most predict predictions I think, of some utopian future. If something happens, so in effect we seem to have taken over an aspect of that and saying that as some said then, well now the end of the Cold War proved that the system of capitalism and what we call democracy is the future of the world.
And so it became fashionable to say that, well the United States and its democratic allies should do their best to extend democracy in the world and to defend it.
Well, that was very similar to what the Soviet Union up to Gorbachev had been trying to do. That is, spread what they call socialism in the world which was supposed to become communism. I would say, by the way, it was not the socialism that Marx had predicted at all. I think it was more likely to be characterized as a state monopoly capitalism and but that's another question.
The problem was that again you had the prediction of some sort of utopia which said that it was sort of the duty of what we call democratic countries to spread democracy and to do so by whatever means necessary. Now when you think about it that's a ridiculous idea.
If democracy means control of the people and by the people in the countries where they are, how can an outsider create it for somebody else? They can't. And when you start trying to support certain factions in another country, you're probably going to do them harm because nobody wants outsiders interfering in what you consider your domestic affairs.
And but that's one thing. And then I would say also, the United States did come out of first of all the Second World War and then and then the Cold War as the economically most powerful country in the world and we had established a financial system that was very favorable to the United States.
We were able to run increasingly, you might say, budgetary deficits and yet borrow money and since we in effect control the movements of not control, but sort of supervised the movements of capital and payments, this this gave us, I'd say, tremendous power. We could run deficits when others couldn't for example.
But we started using that also as a political weapon. If a country is doing something you don't like, you start putting sanctions on them. And this I think has not helped things at all, that's made things worse. And right now I think we are running a dangerously high deficits.
The United States now is over $40 trillion dollars in debt and that's the government and domestically, also debt is extremely high and but that is going to, I think, erode the value, and we at the same time are sanctioning countries so that those who are being sanctioned like know Russia particularly, or Iran or China, and others are developing, I think, ways to deal with that. And so that I think that these mistaken policies have overcommitted the United States and an attempt rather than to, I would say, maintain a balance and stay out of local fights and help the parties to bring about peace which I think we had the possibility of doing in the in the early '90s.
We begin to take sides with one or the other and even to get involved militarily and I think that was a huge mistake and I think we're now seeing the results of that now, but so I would also say the whole idea that we heard at the time that where there had been two superpowers that run the world and now once the Soviet Union collapsed and I would say it collapsed not because of pressure from the West but internally, the pressures internally, and at the time the United States did not want it to collapse and we did want the three Baltic countries to regain their independence. We had never recognized they were legally part of the Soviet Union, but we really wanted the other 12 republics to adhere to Gorbachev's attempt to create a voluntary federation. So the idea that somehow, by the Cold War, we broke up the Soviet Union, gets it entirely wrong.
But so we saw developments that instead of continuing the sort of diplomacy that we had gone about to bring the Cold War to an end, we started doing the opposite. I would say that, you know, at the height of the Cold War, although President Reagan criticized communism very severely, he never once publicly insulted a Soviet leader.
In fact, I remember when he first met Gromyko, the foreign minister, as they shook hands, he said, "We hold the peace of the world in our hands. We must cooperate."
And he treated the Soviet leaders with, I would say, he would treat the foreign ministers almost as if they were chiefs of state, with, you know, formal dinners in the Lincoln dining room and he also understood that you don't help human rights by publicly campaigning on another country. In fact, just before he met Gorbachev for the first time, he wrote he sort of dictated what he thought about Gorbachev and what he was going to try to achieve. And this was handed to me as we got on the plane to go to Geneva in the meeting. And what he said there was very interesting things on human rights. He said, "We're too upfront on human rights and that we can we can hammer at them publicly, but it's not going to help the victims. In fact, it could hurt them. We've got to start dealing with this privately." And when he finished it, one of the last sentences was, "Whatever we achieve, we must not call it victory because that would make further problems impossible."
So, I would say that, you know, he was a president who was not a great intellectual or historian, but he knew how to deal with people. And maybe because he was a professional actor, he was able to put himself in the other person's shoes. And what he wanted from us most of all was to explain where Gorbachev was coming from and how could they could find common cause. Now you compare this with what's happened since then when we're hammering them on human rights at the same time we have got problems here and then even sanctioning them well at times on that and then you have the sort of the public demonization of the President of Russia. Well, I certainly don't like a lot of things he's done, but we have to recognize that he took that country out of near chaos because the '90s for Russians were not democratization as we thought it was. It was almost anarchy.
And after he became president he took a bankrupt country and in three or four years paid off all the foreign debts. I mean, even with all of the sanctions and the freezing of Russian assets abroad, Russia has a favorable balance of payments and has been able to survive the sanctions. So that I think that so much has happened that the opposite of what we-
PASCAL- All right, we just had a very little
interruption due to internet connectivity issues, but we are back
online with Ambassador Matlock.
Ambassador Matlock, you were just talking about you know these
the failings of the '90s, right, of how Russia was treated at the
time. Maybe you want to continue there.
JACK- Yes. The thing is that instead of at the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, instead of bringing Russia into a European security structure, which was expected by those of us who negotiated the end of the Cold War, we left Russia out and began expanding NATO and using it offensively.
And it was obvious that Russia was going to consider this a threat, particularly when we began to put military bases in Eastern Europe in countries that once had been sort of allied with Russia.
And I think this was very mistaken because Russia could only consider that a threat.
And then there was an attempt to bring countries like Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, and this could only have been considered an offensive action by Russia because traditionally these had been areas that for centuries had been part of the same country as Russia.
And although Russia had recognized their independence at the time the Soviet Union broke up, that they recognized the independence of countries that were neutral and were not the allies of anyone. As a matter of fact, the original Ukrainian constitution stated that it would be a neutral country. It also gave full language rights to Russians and other linguistic minorities. And when Ukraine got independence, 44% of the people actually preferred to speak Russian and this was particularly true in the eastern part of the country.
But so when there were attempts by NATO to bring more and more countries in, I think that the Russian President made it very clear that that was unacceptable.
In fact, he first made that clear in speech in Munich and I think it was around 2007-2008.
And I must say I when I was teaching international relations, I had my students look at that speech and say, "Are these things that were these criticisms valid?" In other words, were these things that the United States and NATO should have been doing? And I think every student that studied it came out and said, "Well, no, we didn't need to do those things." And it didn't make much sense. But we went ahead and I said it was at first Russia and President Putin accepted the initial expansion of NATO to Czechoslovakia, to the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary and then even to the three Baltic countries.
He was making a speech in New York when that was an issue and I asked him directly, I said what do you think about that and he said well, it's not I think, it is not necessary, but as long as there are no bases we're not going to oppose it - but then it continued and then the expansion was into countries like Romania and Bulgaria And then the Obama administration began to put bases there. At first it was things like anti-ballistic missiles. And the trouble with those anti-ballistic missiles were, they could easily be converted into an offensive missile. They were designed to be used either way. Now, there's no way that that wasn't going to be considered a serious threat by any Russian president, I would say. But, this process continued, and so I think that at the same time, the Ukrainians were revising their constitution, they took the neutrality out of it, proclaimed they wanted to be a part of the EU and NATO and so that it was pretty clear the reasons that any Russian president would worry about that. At the same time, NATO was increasingly being used in an offensive way.
Yeah, when the United States invaded Afghanistan, that was legalized by the Security Council and Russia actually cooperated in that but then suddenly we invade Iraq and Iraq had done nothing to us. We claimed that they might have nuclear weapons or chemical warfare and turned out they didn't. But we invaded, occupied them and then later we used NATO to attack Libya and actually assassinated the leader.
So that it was clear that NATO is being used in an offensive way and outside Europe although it was supposed to apply only to Europe. I think that when NATO then began to involve itself in in Ukraine, there was a rebellion in eastern Ukraine, after a coup d'état. This was in 2014. So that the elected government was removed and a coup d'état which Russia had every reason to believe that the United States and the EU were involved in that. And I would say, you know, during the Cold War, if there had been a coup d'état in a country that we thought was being taken over by the Communists, we would not have recognized it.
You know, there were for decades, we didn't recognize communist China because it came, you know, through a revolution.
But the thing is that it was very obvious why Russia would consider NATO a threat. And yet then of course you had in 2014 Russia taking Crimea. Now the thing there, they did that peacefully and held a referendum which was overwhelmingly in favor of Russia. And there's reason to think that the great majority of people in Crimea preferred Russia to Ukraine - they were Russian-speaking and the Ukrainians had tried in effect to disenfranchise them because they were Russian if they didn't suddenly take on Ukrainian names and speak only Ukrainian.
So and I would say that NATO earlier had set a precedent for this. But by making, well they made war against Serbia when Serbia had not attacked any NATO country, and then they recognized the independence of Kosovo against Serbia's opposition.
But an agreement we made when we were trying to end the Cold War was that there should be no territorial changes in Europe without the mutual consent. So that NATO actually set a precedent for what Russia did in Ukraine, but they did it even without a referendum.
So that in a sense if what Russia did in Ukraine was illegal, what NATO did in to Serbia over Kosovo was doubly illegal. We seem not to recognize that United States and NATO had set precedence that later when Russia acted in the same way - Oh, that's illegal and we have to sanction them. But no one has sanctioned the United States when it attacked and occupied Iraq or later Libya.
So I think that the way this has been looked at by the Europeans who are now, you know, giving major military support to Ukraine with weapons and intelligence support that allows them to attack Russia.
This is turning out to be suicidal for Ukraine. And I really have trouble understanding how the Europeans keep pushing these things.
PASCAL- Can I add a question, because your description is exactly how I view how this whole spiral of escalation happened. And a lot of this has to do with the inability of western leaders to accept a neutral status for Ukraine as a way to create a buffer to create a mutually acceptable security structure which you actually worked on.
I mean you and Reagan and so on, you actively worked on having a balance that then would allow to end the Cold War that would allow for stability on the European continent. And now we are 30 years later and people actively work on destabilizing the European, this mutual security structure. The only ones talking about mutual security is the Russians who understand you cannot do security against somebody only with them. Why did the conception of the West change so dramatically from people like you and Reagan and so on, to this this new leadership that is that is in in power now that uses NATO offensively in order to ram and drive over perceived opponents rather than trying to create coexistence and how would [can] we turn that back? How do we get back to people of your caliber to create a constructive piece?
JACK- Well, I think what happened is people simply misinterpreted the end of the Cold War. They looked at it as a western victory over what they said, Russia.
Although the fact was that we ended the Cold War peacefully and the Soviet Union broke up because of internal pressures and not because the country was defeated.
But then there was the idea that, well what we call democracy, is the future of the world and we have to promote it using whatever military and economic force we can and I think also there was the feeling that human rights should be protected, if necessary, you know, by using force or sanctions.
Although when you start using force, you end up making a situation worse than it would have been otherwise.
So I think that the fact that we looked at the end of the Cold War not as a negotiated settlement which created a world and in which the major powers could cooperate and instead of trying to dominate each other, cooperate by trying to keep the development of technology, particularly a technology for killing under some sort of control, because when you start using force against each other or the sort of economic sanctions that cause great distress of the population, not necessarily of the leaders, I think you're creating a world which is poorly suited for keeping these new weapons of destruction under control. And the idea that the one country, like the United States or earlier that two countries, the US and the Soviet Union, could run everything or change the world in the ways we wanted to, I think was simply a wrong perception, a tragically wrong one. Yeah. And it has really gotten us into the situation today.
PASCAL- Just one more thing which I seriously wonder about, when you were in Moscow and in '86, '87, '88, do you think that there was a common understanding of the current situation that the United States and Russia, you and Gorbachev, you both understood the situation of the Cold War, the Cold War dynamic, was it understood in the same way or were there two narratives, you know, a US narrative of what's happening and a Soviet narrative because right now it seems to me that we have two narratives. We have the Western narrative of what this conflagration is about and we have the Russian narrative. At the in your time, was it was it two narratives, or was it one kind of shared understanding of the problem?
JACK- I think that certainly Reagan and Gorbachev understood they were two people who really wanted to abolish nuclear weapons and they know maybe that wasn't even technically possible at that time, given all the problems, but these were two people who genuinely thought they would could bring, you know, an end to nuclear weapons but this was not the view of their successors. So that's one of the problems, but as I said, the feeling that the US and the West or you know, capitalism and democracy, and I must say we use these terms, I think, in a misleading way. I think it is proper to talk about a democratic process in the sense that a country which ultimately relies upon the consent of its citizens, but to say that one country is democratic and another is not when for example in the United States, we don't we have a republic, we have a republic which is controlled essentially by an oligarchy. And after all, when we look at things like the Senate where every state has just two representatives so that Wyoming, you know, has the same as California or Texas. So and this is not democratic and you can think of another many other aspects that are not. But to say that although one country is democratic and the other is not I think is wrong. Now there's no question that, you know, that we have more democratic processes, but when we were sanctioning Russia for various things, I think you had a President of Russia who had greater approval than any American president at that time. So to say oh, they're not the democracy and we are, and it's our mission to spread democracy in the world you're taking on. I think first of all, it's wrong to think that one country can spread democracy to another, but second, you are simply, I would say, mixing up concepts in a way that is basically very dangerous.
PASCAL- Yes, it is. Yes, it is. And it leads us down a very, very dangerous path as we are seeing right now. Ambassador Matlock, I occupied a lot of your time and I really thank you for that.
Is there any place where people can go to follow your writing or your publications?
JACK- Uh, yes. I have a website jackmatlock.com, and you can find my latest book, can be downloaded free from that. And I've written three other books and some are out of print but they're generally available, you know, from book sellers, but one is called Autopsy on an Empire and it's a description of how the Soviet Union broke up. Another, I had Reagan and Gorbachev and How the Cold War ended where I describe our diplomacy.
And then in 2010, I published one called Superpower Illusions where I described how we were getting off track in that, and made some of the criticisms that I've voiced today. So these are generally available. But I would say the most recent one which was a collection of articles I wrote over a period of time concerning the negotiations that we ended the Cold War, concerning the Ukraine situation and how that developed and some of the other questions today. But I called it Looking Back to Look Ahead, and so that I was thinking over my own experiences and the lessons I might have for today.
PASCAL- But that can be downloaded from my web page and I will put links to your web page jackmatlock.com into the description box of this video below. I recommend everybody who's interested in this to actually download the books, get them and study them because they are case studies of how to do real diplomacy and peace.
JACK- For which I thank you so much.
PASCAL- Ambassador Matlock, and see you next time again.
JACK- Thank you for having me. It's always great to see you.
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