Machinations of Empire

On June 14th, Lena Petrova had an interview with Prof. David N. Gibbs on her YouTube podcast. Dr. David Gibbs is Professor of History at the University of Arizona and one of the leading scholars of U.S. foreign policy, international relations, and political economy. His research focuses on topics ranging from the Balkan conflicts, to Afghanistan, NATO expansion, and the broader evolution of American foreign policy.

Prof. Gibbs is the author of many influential books, including Revolt of the Rich: How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America's Class Divide and First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia.

Dr. David Gibbs: THE SHOCKING TRUTH - How Endless Wars Keep U.S. Hegemony Alive - World Affairs in Context

Lena: Today we will discuss the current geopolitical landscape, the war in Ukraine, the legacy of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and what this experience can actually teach us about the major conflicts and wars and power struggles shaping the world today. Professor Gibbs, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm so thrilled for this conversation and to have you on the program. Professor, much of your work has examined how U.S. foreign policy is formulated and how public support is actually mobilized for foreign interventions. Could you briefly talk to us about the legality aspect of foreign interventions since they have become effectively a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy in the post-cold war era as well as prior to the end of the Cold War too?

Prof. Gibbs: Yes. Since 1945, the main method through which the United States has influenced world affairs has been covert intervention, mostly by the CIA. There's actually a very good book on this published fairly recently called "Covert Regime Change" by Lindsey O'Rourke. She has probably the most detailed account at least from an academic that I've seen so far. And I think one of the things that has to be emphasized is that, well the first place, I think covert intervention is favored over intervention. Overt intervention being you know the landing of U.S. forces with the flag flying with soldiers in uniform. That is done. It was done in Vietnam. It was done in Korea. But I think it's not the preferred method because there's always the danger of public opposition. And if you do it secretly with the possibility of plausible deniability, the public doesn't have to become involved at all. The public does not have to rear its ugly head, so to speak. You don't have to deal with the complications of democracy. You can just act unilaterally and cover up the whole thing. And that's mostly how it's been done. With regard to legality, foreign intervention is completely illegal.

The United States is signatory to the charter of the Organization of American States [OAS] which came into force in 1951. It was largely crafted by the United States and emphatically forbids foreign intervention, all forms of intervention into domestic affairs of other countries, a blanket prohibition and it's worded very strongly. The United States is bound by this as a treaty signatory and so all of the interventions it's undertaken all these covert interventions have been completely in violation of that treaty and therefore illegal also there's one more point which is that for those who care to read the U.S. Constitution there's a clause [Article VI, Clause 2] in it which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, meaning that they have domestic standing for the U.S. to violate a treaty such as the OAS charters, is to violate the Constitution. Now the courts have not enforced this and as far as I'm aware, I don't think they've even weighed in on this question, but that clause is there in the Constitution for all to see for those who read it.

And so all of these interventions have been acts of illegality under U.S. law. It's interesting that you mentioned Lindsey O'Rourke's work because as I was preparing for this interview, I've looked into her work and she identified 64 covert U.S.-backed regime change operations between 1947 and 1989 along with six overt regime changes that were carried out through as you mentioned, direct military intervention. And so since the end of the Cold War, many observers have argued that these methods have actually evolved rather than disappeared. They've become more sophisticated. And of course, the CIA-orchestrated Maidan coup in Ukraine is now the most recent and extremely tragic example.

Lena: Could you talk to us about the Maidan coup and how it fits into the broader U.S. foreign policy in terms of you know regime change of unaligned governments worldwide?

Prof. Gibbs: Yes. In 2014 you had an elected government in Ukraine under Victor Yanukovych [Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych] who was I guess you could say he was Russian-leaning. Ukraine had long been divided between an eastern and southern portion that looked more towards Russia and a central and western portion that looked towards the EU and NATO. And Yanukovych seems to have favored the pro-Russian element in Ukraine and was leaning his foreign policy towards Russia. And there was an uprising against him in 2014. It was a domestic uprising in in the capital Kiev, but there's no doubt it was strongly supported by the United States, so much so I mean this was, we don't really know the full story, but what we know publicly is that the Assistant Secretary of State for Eurasia, her name was Victoria Nuland was openly with the demonstrators, were demanding Yanukovych resign, handing out cookies to them meaning showing the U.S. supported them. That's very significant in itself, the fact that the leading superpower in the world wants you to overthrow the government is a very strong impetus to actually do so. Furthermore, we now have an intercepted conversation which was published in the BBC verbatim between Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey R. Pyatt, I believe is his name, who is [2013-2016] the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and they were openly discussing U.S. intervention in the overthrow of the government and the setting up of a new government. Yanukovych was overthrown. He fled just ahead of a, I don't know, gang that was trying to maybe lynch him or something. He fled to Russia and that was a completely illegal regime change under Ukrainian constitution. There's nothing in the constitution that says that a mob can chase the president out of the country. That's just in essence what happened.

And in the context of that event the State Department and the U.S. Embassy were talking about how they were going to basically set up a new government in Ukraine and we're doing it quite brazenly and, well not openly this is, this was secret but it was intercepted probably by the Russians and the transcript was made available, it's now publicly available through the BBC and many other places. Jeffrey Sachs, a very prominent economist at Columbia University who advised both, many instances over many years both the Russian and Ukrainian governments, was in Kiev shortly after the overthrow and he's publicly spoken about how U.S. officials were boasting to him about all the things they were doing basically to influence events in Ukraine during that event that was clearly foreign intervention all right and totally illegal by the OAS treaty - again the United States is bound by a treaty that forbids this kind of action but we did it anyway.

And so I think that was very significant because of that sent set Ukraine on the road to war. Immediately Russia annexed Crimea which was 90% Russian speaking. And then a civil war broke out in eastern Ukraine in what's called the Donbas region, where the Russian speaking minority who lived in that area wanted to secede from Ukraine and were fighting the Ukrainian army and were being backed by Russia. And so you had a civil war commence in 2014 that laid the groundwork to eventually the Russian invasion in 2022.

And none of this would have happened if the United States had not assisted in the overthrow of the government of Ukraine. And so that certainly was one event. I mean, another thing, a larger issue of course is the expansion of NATO, which I think is even more an underlying event leading to the Russian invasion. But let me stop for a moment and see if you want to interject anything or ask any questions.

Lena: No, no, this is absolutely fascinating and I would love for you to continue because I think this is so important. Very often people dismiss these points that you just walked us through because they hear them from maybe somebody who's not from the United States but I think it is so important for to hear this from an American scholar who has studied this in such great detail and understands the broader scope of the sort of interventionism and the impact that it's had on democratically elected governments. For example, the government of Victor Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014.

Prof. Gibbs: That's right, that's right. I think people quite rightly condemn the Russian invasion of 2022 as a violation of the UN charter, which it was. It did not arise to, you know, a straightforward case of defensive war. There were defensive aspects to it, but I don't think it rose to the level that it was a defensive war in the strict sense. And then there it was indeed a violation of the UN charter. And people rightly condemn it for that, but they ignore the U.S. intervention that preceded it. And I think more importantly, they ignore the fact I think the United States was by all indications trying to provoke a war. The fact is that NATO intervention was critical to this event. The United States had promised [Mikhail Sergeyevich] Gorbachev, in fact, it wasn't just the United States. United States, Germany, Britain, and France all promised Gorbachev in 1990 that there would be no expansion of NATO into the former communist states of Eastern Europe. Others have stated repeatedly and emphatically, there's a mountain of documentation on this. By the way, those who are interested can look at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has the documents in which these promises were made. They were made publicly as well, I should add.

And it was part of a quid pro quo that Germany was about to be reunified. East and West Germany were about to be joined into a singular Germany. The United States clearly wanted that to happen. West Germany wanted that to happen. And the Soviet Union through its veto power on the Security Council was in a position to block this unification, which they were going to do because a number of reasons including I think traditional Russian fears of the Germans for obvious reasons, obvious historical reasons. And so there a quit pro quo [that] was proposed. If Russia, the Soviet Union, then would allow German reunification, there would be no expansion of NATO into the former communist states in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union agreed to that. It allowed their reunification to happen. It did not block it at the Security Council and the United States then began to violate the agreement and began to prepare for and ultimately did begin to incorporate Eastern European states beginning in 1999 into NATO and there were waves of this occurring and in 2008 it was announced that Ukraine would join NATO and the Russians declared that would not happen. They saw that as a threat to their security and I think that's really the main reason we have a war now is the U.S. insistence that eventually Ukraine would join NATO. I think Russia saw that as intolerable.

Lena: In an interview back in 2022, Hillary Clinton notoriously referred to the war in Afghanistan as a U.S. proxy war. Effectively, she didn't use those words, but that was sort of the meaning of what she said. And she effectively said that the United States has to finish the job that it began in Afghanistan. Since the United States directly armed and funded the Afghan mujahedeen who resisted the Soviets, she apparently pointed to the West arming and then funding Zelenskyy's regime as a way to complete the task. Could you walk us through this comparison, Professor Gibbs, and give us a broader picture and how this fits into sort of that historical agenda of defeating a peer great power and the great power competition between the United States and first the Soviet Union and then Russia.

Prof. Gibbs: I think what you have here is the closest historical parallel we have and a very close parallel indeed to the Russia-Ukraine war, is the Russia Afghanistan war of the 1980s beginning in 1979. It's a very close parallel indeed and it's recognized in Washington. Hillary Clinton explicitly referred to it and in that sense she's undoubtedly correct. It's a disturbing parallel because we have a lot of new information on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan underscoring what was not known at the time which is the United States deliberately provoked that invasion and worked very hard to achieve it. Let me walk you through - should I stop there or should I walk through the history? Do you want to ask any questions before I ...?

Lena: No, no. I would I would love to hear about the history because that's going to set the background for understanding what's happening right now in Ukraine.

Prof. Gibbs: Right, Right. Well, what we have here is that Afghanistan was neutral in the Cold War. It did not, it was not in either block. It was you might say it was a little bit like Finland before Finland joined NATO, which is that it was a neutral country, but with a kind of pro-Soviet tilt in its foreign policy in that its military officers were educated at Soviet academies mostly and they bought Soviet arms, and the Soviet Union was the main supplier of economic aid, but the Soviets had no really significant influence on domestic politics in Afghanistan. And by all indications, if you look at the diplomatic record of the United States from 1945 until the Soviet invasion, several things come out. One of them is Afghanistan was strategically worthless to the United States. All right. Later on when the Soviets invaded it was declared to be one of the most strategically important places on earth. This was an invention.

Okay, this was a complete invention because for 30 years U.S. foreign policy documents that said again and again, decade after decade that Afghanistan is so remote, it is so mountainous is of no strategic importance to the United States. It's important to the Soviet Union because it borders on the Soviet Union and the Soviets are always concerned about anything on their borders, but it's not of any interest to the United States. An interesting figure here, by the way, who played a major role in the invasion was Zbigniew [Kazimierz] Brzeziński, who was a Colombia political scientist and later national security adviser [1977-1981] to President Carter [and counselor to Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968]. He played a central role in the Soviet invasion, as we'll see. But he was before that a political scientist and he published extensively and so far as I could tell he made no significant mention at all of Afghanistan. It was just nowhere in his books. I found one mention of it in passing where he laid a series of countries that had voted a particular way in the general assembly and in this laundry list Afghanistan was there. I found no other mention of Afghanistan. All right.

And so that's a way of stating emphatically, in Brzeziński's view, Afghanistan was of no strategic importance. It's interesting because later on Brzeziński would insist it's strategically vital. So you have this interesting thing that Afghanistan was invented you might say as a strategically important country when it was convenient. But that it really was a fabrication is what we have here. If you look at the long-term record it's clear that claim was a fabrication. Bottom line is that in the late '70s the United States, there was a massive lobbying campaign by neoconservatives, the neoconservative movement backed by weapons manufacturers. One of the biggest lobbying campaigns in history aimed at raising the military budget. After Vietnam, the military budget had been lowered because of low public confidence in the military and there was a big backlash against this by foreign policy elites. And that began to have real impact and a major element in this lobbying campaign was Zbigniew Brzeziński, he was very much in the neoconservative camp.

You might say in the Carter presidency you had lobbyists outside the administration pushing from outside and Brzeziński pushing from inside for a major increase in military spending. And one thing about the neoconservatives is in private they said, I've seen their papers at Stanford, I've looked at the private papers they talked about a Pearl Harbor moment. We need something to shock the public. So shocking just like Pearl Harbor that they'll come around to the idea of increased military spending. And that Pearl Harbor moment [came] with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Repeatedly in the documents in the '50s for example, there was a document that raised the question what hypothetically would happen if the Soviets were to invade Afghanistan and the answer would be America would do nothing really because Afghanistan is strategically worthless. That's what it said. All right. But now they wanted some big crisis. So they made Afghanistan to something it never was, which is a strategic pivot of the world. All right.

And so the first thing they did was to cook up the idea, and it really was cooked up, that Afghanistan was strategically important. Brzeziński was even saying this privately to influence people in the administration who didn't know anything about Afghanistan. And publicly he was saying it too. But one of the things he was doing is he was trying to bait the Soviets into invading Afghanistan, for a very complicated series of reasons, had a takeover by the local communist party in 1978. Probably not backed by the Soviets. The Soviets never trusted the Communist Party of Afghanistan. They regarded them as a lot of hotheads, shall we say. And when they took over, the communists did what the Soviets had feared, which is they alienated the whole population. And there was a massive popular uprising against the communists that was Afghan-led. It was by the people of Afghanistan in the rural areas. And you had a civil war take place. The Soviets did with reluctance start giving aid to the communist party because they feared an Islamic extremist government on their borders. But they refused to send troops. And if you look at the declassified documents, it's interesting is that we have the American documents and we have the Soviet documents. We have both now. And what they show is almost identical, which is the Soviets were being begged by the Afghan Communist Party to send in Soviet troops. And the Soviets kept refusing to send troops.

And in the Soviet Central Committee, there was a meeting in which top officials said, "If we send troops, we'd have to start shooting Afghan civilians and it would look terrible. We don't want to do that. It would be bad for our image in the world." And so we'll continue to give weapons and training to the Afghan communists and their army, but we will not send troops. This is interesting because publicly Brzeziński was saying the Soviets are dying to, the Soviets would love to occupy Afghanistan. The one thing they would really want to do is occupy Afghanistan. That's not true at all. The Soviets, that was the last thing they wanted to do. Also, I should add, American officials were sending intelligence reports from Kabul, emphasizing that the Soviets did not want to send troops, that they did not control events in Afghanistan. They were trying to restrain the Afghan communists. The main the main figure here was named Hafizullah Amin who was the number two figure in the party, but he was the real moving force behind the party. He was the foreign minister and he was the leading figure who advocated [for] a major rapid change towards communism. The Soviets had insisted Afghanistan isn't ready for communism.

But Hafizullah Amin wanted immediate change to communism and the Soviets really intensely disliked Amin and that's very clear from the documents and they had no control over Afghanistan and Brzeziński knew this because he was reading the intelligence reports but he was saying publicly the Soviets control Afghanistan. He was wildly exaggerating what was going on there. He was engaging in threat inflation. He was engaging in inflation in terms of the degree of Soviet control and the Soviet interest in occupying the country. And the reason was they needed a crisis. They needed a crisis to convince the public to increase military spending. Let me stop for a moment and see if you have any questions or comments.

Lena: No, this is absolutely fascinating and you just reminded me of this wonderful book that I recently read by Khaled Hosseini. The book is titled A Thousand Splendid Suns and it takes place in Afghanistan during the uprising that you just described and then goes all the way through the Soviet invasion and kind of stops I think just before the U.S. invasion or occupation. And it's fascinating because my understanding is that the mujahedeen they were not a unified group. They were sort of just multiple groups that somehow were emboldened by the U.S. role in Afghanistan and by the funding and arming of these radical factions that could resist, could then resist the Soviet occupation. Is that accurate?

Prof. Gibbs: Yes, you had this group of Afghans collectively known as the Mujahedeen, the holy warriors, were fighting the Soviets mostly in the name of Afghan nationalism but also Islam and you're quite correct. There were six different groups they were not unified at all they were not very nice people by the way - the very few heroes come out of this the leading figure was named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had a terrible record of torture and repression in his own organization. He was also deeply involved in heroin trafficking, which the United States knew. And he was presented as this great hero, but he was anything but a hero. And I think when the war was over, everybody admitted he was just awful. But we backed him because he was killing Russian soldiers.

But in any case, there was a heavy element of propaganda to this. One of the things, the beauty of Afghanistan, one of the reasons Afghanistan was perfect as an arena to sort of supercharge public fear of the Soviets was nobody knew anything about Afghanistan. It was the most obscure country on the planet. There was almost no information, no independent information in Afghanistan. There were very few experts on Afghanistan and most of them I suspect were probably working for the CIA privately. And so in economics there's something called optimal ignorance which means that most people are ignorant about most things most of the time and that it's a real problem for democracy because the whole idea is people are supposed to vote based upon information. You know you vote for the party in power if you like what they're doing. You vote them out if you don't like what they're doing. Problem is you don't really know what they're doing.

You don't really know what's going on because you have lack of information. Who really knew of anything about Afghanistan? Hardly anybody. So, it was perfect, it was the perfect place to deceive the public. And deceiving the public here was central. And creating a Pearl Harbor moment, something that would so shock the public they would go ahead with the idea of massively increased military spending, which they got. Now a bit more in Afghanistan was that the Mujahedeen guerillas initially were not fighting Soviet troops. They were fighting the Afghan communist army. And initially it was a domestic army backed with Soviet weapons and Soviet training but not Soviet troops. In other words, there was a communist takeover in '78 and for about a year and a half - it was a domestic affair. And then in December [25th] 1979, the Soviets actually invaded the country. They sent in a commando force that the first thing they did was to assassinate Hafizullah Amin, the head of the communist party. He was initially the number two but then he eventually became the number one figure.

When the Soviets invaded the first thing they did was to kill Amin underscoring the fact that they really didn't like Amin and they certainly did not control him. One of the reasons they invaded, by the way, we'll get into why they invaded, but then they occupied the country for nine years with about 100,000 troops and the claim was two things - the Soviets had always wanted to occupy Afghanistan, this was a long-term strategic goal and the reason they wanted to do it is Afghanistan is strategically vital - it is the gateway to the Persian Gulf and the gateway to the Indian Ocean and the Soviets in doing this in invading Afghanistan were seeking to undermine the West by gaining access to those critical areas, most notably the Persian Gulf. And everyone knows, of course, the Persian Gulf was the, you know, the largest reserves of oil in the world then as now. And so that was really what they were doing. That was the claim. Again, the problem with this is that we have 30 years of documentation that says that Afghanistan was of no strategic worth to the United States. It's too mountainous. It's too far from the Persian Gulf. And it's not in any way a threat to the Persian Gulf, thirty years of documentation saying that. Brzeziński's own writings affirm that because he barely mentioned Afghanistan. Now suddenly Afghanistan is recreated into something it never was, which is the strategic pivot of the world. All right. That's a complete invention. All right. Secondly, the claim was made that the Soviets wanted to invade Afghanistan because of its strategic importance.

We now know not only was it reluctantly done, but it was provoked by the United States and intentionally provoked by the United States and let's go into that a little bit. The Soviets were becoming very paranoid about two things. First of all, Hafizullah Amin was in charge and he was the person that the Soviets distrusted the most, because he was seen as a destabilizing figure. Also, he'd been a student in the United States and had briefly been involved in a student organization that had ties to the CIA. And there were some lingering suspicions he might be CIA. I don't think he was, by the way, but the Soviets were very paranoid about that. And when he took power just before the Soviets invaded, I began talking to the U.S. embassy behind the Soviet's back and he began publicly talking about maybe diversifying the Afghanistan source of foreign support which the Soviets interpreted as maybe moving away from the Soviets and moving to the United States. And this coincided with something else which is the United States in July 3rd 1979 - for the first time began giving direct aid to the mujahedeen guerrillas. Now in public this was always denied and in public it was claimed that we did that only after the Soviets invaded. But now we know the United States began giving aid through the CIA in small quantities but nevertheless aid to the Mujahedeen six months before the invasion.

And the United States had to realize that in doing that, that would massively increase the Soviet Union's paranoia and increase the feeling that the United States was deliberately trying to destabilize Afghanistan to gain access to an area on Soviet borders. That is how the Soviets looked at it and that, we now know, the United States did it intentionally. And the way we know that is Brzeziński boasted about this later. A number of things. First, he was interviewed in 1998 with a French magazine called Le Nouvel Obs. The original interview was in French, but I've translated into English. You can find it on my website. And in that interview, Brzeziński emphatically stated that he was the main advocate of America giving aid to the Mujahedeen. He did it knowing that it would provoke a Soviet invasion, but he did it anyway. And he made it very clear. He was he was delighted about the invasion. And he said this again and again. He said he lured them into the Afghan trap. That's how he put it. He lured them into the Afghan trap. Meaning that they were reluctant to intervene, but he wanted them to intervene. This goes directly against everything he was saying publicly and even much of what he was saying to his colleagues, which is that he was shocked by the invasion. It's a big setback to the United States. It's a huge threat to American security in private. What he really was doing, and he's clear about this, is he wanted the invasion to occur because he saw it not as a bad thing, but as a good thing, not as a strategic liability to the U.S., but a strategic asset. The way he put it is it would be a way of getting even for Vietnam. He would give the Soviets their Vietnam just as we were humiliated in Vietnam, let them be humiliated in Afghanistan. There was another reason which I don't think he mentioned, which is that it provided a good pretext for raising military spending. I think that was the main objective here. Let me add this - there's been strenuous efforts by many academics to try and deny that this interview ever happened.

It's not credible. First of all, Le Nouvel Obs is one of the most prestigious publications in France. It's maybe the equivalent if you wanted counterpart to the New York Review of Books in the United States. It has very similar standing in France. And it's very hard to believe they would have made this up. Brzeziński many years later claimed he was misquoted, but that's very unlikely he was misquoted. Furthermore, it's been corroborated. And the way it's been corroborated is that at the time of the invasion, the person who first told Brzeziński about the invasion on December 24th, 1979 was his chief military aid, who was Lieutenant General William [Eldridge] Odom [DNS under Reagan]. And William Odom just informed him of the invasion. And Odom then said what Brzeziński told him was he shook his fist in the air like this in triumph and said they've taken our bait! That's unequivocal. They've taken our bait. And that completely tracks with what he said in the interview with Le Nouvel Obs. So we have two different sources on this. Odom later told this to Jonathan Haslam who's a Cambridge University historian who reported in his book.

And so we have two different sources on this saying virtually almost identical information regarding what Brzeziński was saying and what he was doing. Thirdly, Brzeziński published memoirs in 1983 in which he perfunctorily expressed regret about the invasion, but said it had a positive side. And the positive side was it enabled him to argue more effectively for the more hardline foreign policy he always favored because it completely changed the atmosphere. Again, underscoring it was a good thing, not a bad thing. And so I think all three of these sources, the French magazine interview, the statements to General Odom, and the statements he made in his memoirs all point in exactly the same direction, which is provocation combined with a sense of satisfaction and happiness the invasion occurred. The invasion was not a strategic threat to the United States. It was seen as a strategic positive [for] the United States and public statements to the reverse were false.

Lena: Dr. Gibbs, is it fair to say that the war in Afghanistan has become effectively a model of the proxy engagement, proxy war against Russia in Ukraine? And if that's the case, if that's an accurate statement, then how is this model being used today?

Prof. Gibbs: Well, I think in a number of ways. First of all, the issue of provocation of invasion. There's no doubt based on the record, the United States was provoking the Russians to invade Ukraine. The United States wanted the invasion of Ukraine. I think the American idea was that we would destroy the Russian economy with sanctions. We had a very high opinion of our ability to crush economies through sanctions, and we really thought we could crush the economy of Russia with sanctions and drive Putin out of power and make Russia a vassal state, basically a cooperative vassal state. There is even some talk, I think, outside of the administration, the possibility of breaking up Russia into pieces. This is still discussed. Kaja Kallas, [former Prime Minister of Estonia] the foreign policy chief of the European Union, effectively the foreign minister of the European Union, has talked about this as a possibility. It's amazingly aggressive talk, by the way. Talk about breaking up a country. Imagine if Russia were to talk about breaking up the United States into pieces, but nevertheless, that's what we have here. And so I think that that was the idea was to provoke the invasion and everything the United States was doing was to provoke an invasion in Ukraine. There were numerous off-ramps.

It would have been very easy for the U.S. to have avoided this war. The most important thing would have been United States could have made an emphatic statement that Ukraine will never join NATO and then could have withdrawn all American and British and other NATO forces who were in Ukraine at the time training Ukrainian troops and reaffirmed that Ukraine would be considered at least by the West a neutral state. And there would have been no war, would have been no invasion in overall and that would have been sufficient. But I think the United States wanted the invasion for the same reason that we wanted the Afghanistan invasion. I think the main one was that we thought we could crush Russia. We could we thought that this would give us the pretext to crush Russia. It would knock Russia out of the league of the great powers and it would send a warning shot to China that if we could do this to Russia, we can do this to you, too. And it would reaffirm American power for decades to come. I think that was the plan, it didn't work out. Obviously, the sanctions did not work.

By the way, you know, there's a certain assumption that the Russian economy is in crisis. It's really not true. You can check these facts. You can go to the website of the International Monetary Fund and you can see the Russian economy is not in crisis. All right? They're due for growth this year. Low growth. I think it's only 1 something percent but growth this year and next year. There's nothing in the IMF figures that suggest there's an imminent crisis in the Russian economy, but I think the idea has long been to create a crisis in the Russian economy and to crush the Russians economically. The feeling was that the occupation of Afghanistan contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union. That the stress of having to fight a real war in Afghanistan was sufficiently taxing to the Russians both in terms of loss of personnel as well as economic costs. That contributed to the ending of the Soviet system. There may be something to that. It's unclear. I mean that may have contributed to it. It's possible. In any case, it's widely believed that that's the case. At least in official Washington, it's believed. And I think they wanted to do something like that here, that the stress of the war in Ukraine would simply along with the sanctions would lead to an ending of Russia as a challenger to Americans in Germany, and possibly even lead up to lead to the breakup of the country. I think that was the plan. I think again Afghanistan was clearly the model. I don't think there's any doubt about it. Again, these figures can be checked. If you look at Russia's military expenditures, the key figure here is military expenditures as a percent of GDP. The current figure is 6.5% of GDP. That's not really that high for a country at war. And I doubt that's something Russia cannot sustain over time. 6.5% is not really that high economically.So I don't think the American strategy has worked or will work. But nevertheless that has been the strategy is to use Afghanistan as a model to bring about the ending of the Russian Federation at least in its current form just as the Afghan debacle brought about the breakup of the Soviet Union. So I think that was the plan.

Lena: And of course economic sanctions play a very important role in U.S. foreign policy as well. The United States has sanctioned Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran - Iran has been sanctioned for what 47 years and it still managed to withstand the pressure and to create an alternative framework of financial settlements and being able to still trade with other nations and develop trade ties in that way. It's interesting because you know the role of sanctions seems to target the society from within and seek to destabilize the society from within that would then sort of help destabilize the country and overthrow the regime that's not aligned with the United States. And that was what seems to be the objective in Iran. It didn't work. In Syria, it also didn't work until the Bashar al-Assad was toppled by a former ISIS terrorist effectively, who had a bounty on his head. But in in Russia, it didn't quite work that way. And why do you think it hasn't worked out the way the United States foreign policy leadership has planned or has anticipated? And yet we are seeing the EU trying to impose more and more sanctions on Russia even though as you mentioned there is evidence that suggests that 20-plus sanctions packages haven't worked and in fact there is an argument to be made that they backfired on the EU economy.

Prof. Gibbs: Well I mean let me say I think that what you're seeing in Europe is an element of irrationality. What they're doing is totally irrational. The idea that, you know, another sanctions package, another one, another one, will make any difference at this point is pure fantasy. I think much of what's going on in Europe right now, even more than in the U.S., is fantasy and a very dangerous and reckless fantasy. But I do want to mention with regard to the larger issue of sanctions, there was a study in a British medical journal, the Lancet. I believe that's considered the leading medical journal of Britain and they had a statistical analysis of the health effects of U.S. sanctions over 50 years. I think they measured this from the early '70s to almost the present. And they found that sanctions, what they called unilateral sanctions mostly by the United States, killed about 500,000 people a year. Okay, for a total death toll over 50 years of 28 million. That's an extraordinary number. And based on that number alone, the United States would have to go down as the most deadly country in its foreign policy since 1945, having killed more just in sanctions alone. Forget about warfare, forget about covert operations, just sanctions, have killed more people. The vast majority of whom, by the way, are civilians. Very large numbers of these are children, especially toddlers and infants who have weak immune systems. This would have to be the worst death toll of any foreign policy of any country since 1945. Nothing the Soviet Union had did, even in Afghanistan, was on that scale in terms of the death toll.

So, you know, the idea of the United States is interesting. You know, again, I'm an American citizen. But I do separate American policy from the American public. And I think that one does have to look at what the American policy did coldly and objectively. It is extraordinarily deadly. And you know, in some sense I'm not a fan of Trump for a lot of I think very obvious reasons, but I do appreciate his verbal bluntness. I think more objectionable is someone like Antony Blinken, who would relentlessly talk about the rules-based order and human rights and so on. It's very hard to take that seriously when the United States has this record of promoting mass death on this scale and to promote present the United States as an upholder of rules-based order.

Lena: Absolutely. And of course, Yugoslavia is another example that we shouldn't dismiss because that's another example of the role that NATO as an entity played in destroying a country and causing extreme violence and truly horrible things. I'm actually in the process of reading a book by Michael Parenti that's titled To Kill an Nation and it's such an amazing account of what actually happened and just the death and destruction that NATO policies and U.S. policies as sort of the leader of NATO caused to Yugoslavia and of course we see that sort of being replicated in other countries as well.

Prof. Gibbs: Well, I've written a book myself on Yugoslavia [First Do No Harm] and it's a long story and a very complicated one. I mean, as a general point, I mean, I agree with your analysis what you presented there. I would make one specific point. We don't have a lot of time, so I won't go into the details, but one specific point is this. In 1999, United States went to war with Serbia over its repression in Kosovo. And again, it was presented as a human rights war. But what it did is it massively increased the death toll, is what it did. And the United States scuttled diplomatic negotiating settlement that was almost completed because it wanted war. That's very well documented. And when Serbia did not capitulate immediately, the United States very likely was considering leveling the cities of Serbia. And the way we know this is that Thomas L. Freidman who often acted as a mouthpiece for the State Department in the White House in one of his many New York Times op-eds had an article entitled Stop the Music. And he basically said, "If Serbia doesn't capitulate, America should consider leveling Serbia to the point that we bring it back to the year 1950. And if that doesn't work, we should consider bringing Serbia back to the Middle Ages." He said, "We have the capacity with our air force to do that. That's exactly what we should consider doing."

In other words, other words, he considered what one might call genocidal bombing. All right. When Trump talked about ending Iranian civilization, you know, this is not unprecedented language. This United States has done that, by the way, in other countries. And we were, it's very likely when Freidman was saying this, I suspect he was channeling something he was hearing in the White House or the State Department. I suspect that. I think that's likely. Serbia did eventually capitulate. I think it's widely believed among political scientists, including some very qualified and smart ones like Robert Pape that the air war did not cause Serbia to capitulate. I'm not so sure of that. I think the threat of leveling their cities to the ground as United States may have been threatening to do through Thomas Freidman, I think that may very well have influenced them and frightened them sufficiently that it may have contributed to their decision to capitulate. So I think that that may very well be the case. One doesn't have to emphasize the United States is a very ruthless country. We're willing to go to very, very extreme measures to get our way. And there's an extraordinary mismatch between the rhetoric we get of human rights on the one hand and the actual policies which include things like threatening to level cities. And so I think that the image people have of the Kosovo war as a morally pristine war as a true humanitarian war is completely detached from reality and has nothing to do with the actual record of events.

Lena: Your work often examines the political economy of foreign policy and I would love to briefly touch upon that. What role do defense contractors, security institutions, and of course, bureaucratic interests play in perpetuating this long-term military commitments and effectively forever wars?

Prof. Gibbs: That's a long-standing interest of mine. I do tend to believe that ultimately things have economic motives in most cases. And I think there's an extraordinary linkage between and mostly unanalyzed and unrecognized linkage between economics and foreign policy. The military-industrial complex obviously is one. Another one is foreign investors who rely on U.S. intervention to advance their interests and protect their interests or sometimes avenge their interests when their companies are nationalized. There was a very interesting study done in the Quarterly Journal of Economics which I believe is the most cited journal in the social sciences by three very top economists not political scientists or historians which is interesting but economists who looked at four major covert operations, the overthrow of governments in Iran in '53, Guatemala in '54, Congo in 1960 and Chile in '73. And what they found in all of them was that there was illegal stock trading in companies that were affected that benefited from the overthrows in which somebody was using classified information to make a killing on the stock market. And that indicates basically that people within the CIA or within the top echelons of the foreign policy establishment were using classified information to engage in insider stock trading which is a federal crime and this happened over a period of decades and some of the most sensitive events in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Which underscores the fact that whatever American officials were thinking about when they launched these operations, national security was not the only thing. All right, you might call this, if you want to be impolite, corruption. I prefer the more polite term, the Arabic term baksheesh, what I call the baksheesh factor in U.S. foreign policy.

Not to be underestimated, I think that there's a tendency again among political scientists to be very dismissive of this. The Lindsey O'Rourke book, for example, which is in many respects excellent, is very dismissive of these things. But I think she too quickly dismisses these things and doesn't look at them very carefully. And there's a long history of political corruption and insider stock trading and covert operations. That needs to be looked at much more carefully. And one of the reasons I think it's hard to look at is the documentation is it's either destroyed or it's never put down on paper for obvious reasons, to be documenting a federal crime. Who wants to do that, right? What these do what these economists did is they relied on stock quotations on the New York Stock Exchange and they found that in all four of these cases within 24 hours they looked at when was the operation approved in secret and when was it launched and they found that within 24 hours of the operation being approved there was a massive increase in buying in affected companies on the assumption these companies would benefit and they did statistical analyses and found that it's very unlikely these were random fluctuations, these were non-random fluctuations. Somebody knew about the covert operation in advance based on secret information and was buying stock in accord with their secret information. All right. And that happened repeatedly and that happens I that underscores I think what has also been documented in many other contexts which is there's a very close connection between economic interest and U.S. foreign policy that should not be dismissed in my view.

Lena: I wish we could talk more about this, but I know we're running out of time and maybe the very last question for you: So Afghanistan demonstrated the limits of military power in achieving political objectives. And there might be an argument to be made that actually the Ukraine war also revealed limits to NATO's ability to shape geopolitical outcomes, similar to how Afghanistan exposed limits to both Western and Soviet military power. How do you anticipate this to be sort of that loss? Do you anticipate this to be sort of a lesson that the United States learns from the failures in Afghanistan and Ukraine? Or do you think that the sort of militarism and the machine that drives foreign interventions will keep going, effectively regardless of the human cost and regardless of the failures that it's faced before?

Prof. Gibbs: I think what you're seeing is the public is turning against these kinds of policies. You're seeing a fairly significant public skepticism led ironically by military veterans. A lot of military veterans came back from the war on terror. Very embittered. I know this because I see them in my classes. I teach in southern Arizona where there's a heavy military presence. Over many years I've had a lot of military personnel in my classes and I've seen how embittered they were by their experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. And so I see the public increasingly turning against these things. In the past, it was very easy for the American presidency to generate public support. There's the rally around the flag effect. Whenever there's a crisis, the public supports the president. That seems to be over. There was no rally around the flag effect. There was no big boost to Biden's popularity with the Ukraine crisis and there was no big boost to Trump. In the case of Iran, the majority of the public was opposed to the intervention. That's the first time that ever happened. Their opposition was clear at the outset. In other words, usually what you get is the public supports the intervention at the outset, then it erodes over time as it goes on and on. What's unique here is the public was opposed at the very beginning of the Iran war. All right. The reality around the flag effect is gone and that's very significant. That'll make it much more difficult for future presidents to engage in these kinds of foreign interventions, these foreign adventures.

I think what you're seeing also is the public is realizing there is a trade-off between guns and butter and that these foreign interventions are very expensive. The long-term cost of the war on terror, I believe, has been estimated by Brown University, the Cost of War Project, I believe at more than $6 trillion over the long term. That's more than the GDP of Great Britain. So that's a lot of money. And I think that the public deep down understands that that is in fact coming out of their living standards. And so I think what you're getting here is a kind of populist revolt against overseas military intervention. I would see Donald Trump, the whole MAGA movement as partly a reflection of that. Trump obviously has been highly interventionist. He's been a disaster as a president. But I think the reason a lot of people voted for him is they believed erroneously that he would be a peace president. Okay. The term "America First" means a lot of things but for many people I think what it meant is more spending on elevating living standards of the people in this country and less spending on overseas foreign overseas military adventures. Guns should be less important than butter. That's what I'm seeing happening right now. And I'm hopeful that may basically pose an insuperable barrier for any future presidential efforts at intervention.

Lena: We'll see. We'll see, Professor Gibbs, thank you so much for this conversation. I was absolutely fascinated by what you shared with us and I hope that you come back because I find the subject to be absolutely fascinating as I mentioned and it is so important to continue highlighting this to allow more and more people to get educated and become familiar with the details. Thank you so much for your time today.

Prof. Gibbs: Thank you Lena.

COMMENT: The points brought up in this interview align with what I've been saying recently regarding World War Three, already well in progress. We old people remember the Cold War. While it might grate on your propaganda edifice, EVERY advance in military escalation was initiated by the U.S. Every step of the way. This escalation scheme was intended to weaken Russia since it was assumed they couldn't possibly keep up. America possessed the world-reserve currency which funnels the rest-of-the-world's savings into the U.S. allowing for their massive military spending and extravagant consumerism. They could afford to pay for the most impossibly expensive armaments far beyond what Russia could afford. Yet, Russian ingenuity and extreme sacrifice allowed them to climb the escalation ladder. But there was a problem. All this military buildup led to "Mutually Assured Destruction," in which both nations could be erased from the map. This was in essence, stalemate.

So the U.S. Empire had to entirely change the game. On the surface, the appearance was maintained that nuclear deterrence worked and geopolitical stasis was settled while underneath a new plan was formed. "We still intend to defeat Russia and move on to China - how do we get there while stuck in this MAD stalemate?" It was an extremely long, calculated path to get to this point, following through all the steps noted in this interview - instead of WW-III being the unacceptable assured destruction of both USA and Russia, the U.S.'s usual procedure of fighting its wars on other people's lands had to be implemented. Through all these steps, through Afghanistan, through to Ukraine, through covert actions, through election manipulations, the goal - successful, it seems, was to shift WW-III onto the lands of Europe, leaving them to take the brunt of the damage from trying to defeat Russia. And, like Netanyahu finally finding a president stupid enough to attack Iran, the U.S. has built up this cadre of EU leaders who are too stupid to see how they are being used in this effort. They could, of course, smarten up and save their countries, but they have totally believed their own propaganda and thus risk losing everything. Trying to attack Russia is a fool's errand.
Russia is tired of existential threats along its borders and into its territory – "consequences" are coming soon!

Leave a comment! This is a re-direct to my Substack page.

Return to Limits to Progress Main Page

If you would like to send a donation, please send an Interac eTransfer to email address below. Thank you!

©2026 Kathleen McCroskey