Noam Chomsky: 'We have war criminals walking all over Washington.'
David Barsamian: Let's head into the most obvious nightmare of this moment, the war in Ukraine and its effects globally. But first a little background. Let's start with President George H.W. Bush's assurance to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move"one inch to the east"—and that pledge has been verified.
In 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming majority—I think about 70% of the vote—on a peace platform, a plan to implement peace with Eastern Ukraine and Russia, to settle the problem. He began to move forward on it and, in fact, tried to go to the Donbas, the Russian-oriented eastern region, to implement what's called the Minsk II agreement. It would have meant a kind of federalization of Ukraine with a degree of autonomy for the Donbas, which is what they wanted.
The U.S., of course, has always been opposed to that. This goes way back in Cold War history to French President de Gaulle's initiatives to establish an independent Europe. In his phrase"from the Atlantic to the Urals," integrating Russia with the West, which was a very natural accommodation for trade reasons and, obviously, security reasons as well.
So, those are the games we're playing with the lives of Ukrainians, Asians, and Africans, the future of civilization, in order to weaken Russia, to make sure that they suffer enough. Well, if you want to play that game, be honest about it. There's no moral basis for it. In fact, it's morally horrendous. And the people who are standing on a high horse about how we're upholding principle are moral imbeciles when you think about what's involved.
Barsamian: I've got a little puzzle for you. It's in two parts. Russia's military is inept and incompetent. Its soldiers have very low morale and are poorly led. Its economy ranks with Italy's and Spain's. That's one part. The other part is Russia is a military colossus that threatens to overwhelm us. So, we need more weapons. Let's expand NATO. How do you reconcile those two contradictory thoughts?Those two thoughts are standard in the entire West.
Barsamian: It's also interesting that diplomat George Kennan foresaw the danger of NATO moving its borders east in a very prescient op-ed he wrote that appeared inKennan had also been opposed to NSC-68. In fact, he had been the director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff. He was kicked out and replaced by Paul Nitze. He was regarded as too soft for such a hard world. He was a hawk, radically anticommunist, pretty brutal himself with regard to U.S.
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