In this Conversations on Groong episode, we speak with longtime antiwar author and radio host Scott Horton, whose latest book Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine lays out how decades of U.S. provocations — from NATO expansion to proxy wars and pipeline politics — set the stage for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. We also discuss the silencing of dissent in American media, the disappearance of the antiwar left, and how Armenia fits into the evolving chessboard of U.S. foreign policy.
Warning: This is a rush transcript generated automatically and may contain errors.
Asbed: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this Conversations on Groong episode. Today, we’re speaking with Scott Horton, author, radio host, and editorial director of Antiwar.com and the Libertarian Institute. With over 6,000 interviews under his belt, Scott has long challenged U.S. foreign policy. His new book, Provoked, argues that the 2022 invasion of Ukraine wasn’t unprovoked, but the result of decades of Western escalation.
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Asbed: Let’s get to it. Scott Horton, welcome to the Groong Podcast.
Scott: Hi, thank you both very much for having me. Good to be with you.
Hovik: It’s a pleasure to have you. Scott, before we dive into your book and other topics, I wanted to ask you about the anti-war movement in general in the United States. You know, in the late 1990s and 2000s, there were actual alternative viewpoints presented in mainstream media, discussions challenging the war in Yugoslavia, for instance, the bombing of Belgrade and the Iraq War. Today, it’s almost unbelievable that such discourse existed.
You’re the editorial director of antiwar.com and a go-to resource for many in the anti-war community, especially today when mainstream media has become equivalent to a Pravda. It’s gotten so crazy now that we’re seeing a genocide in Gaza streamed live on TV without significant major civil discontent. So I wanted to ask, what happened to the anti-war sentiments and the anti-war movement in general?
Scott: Yeah, well, so there’s a lot there already. I’ll tell you, I think the anti-war movement even then was not as plugged in to the Israel-Palestine movement or the Palestinians’ plight or really interested in that. Although, of course, the cruelty during the Intifada and all that on both parts, but especially the Israeli government’s part pales in comparison with what’s going on right now. So at that time, it was really not exactly center stage either.
Although there’s always been some leftists who are very interested in the issue, but by and large, otherwise, no. But then, you know, you bring up the Kosovo War. The only real, like, dissent in the major media at that time was on right-wing talk radio out in the country. You know, TV and newspapers, the Weekly Standard, the National Review, and John McCain and the leadership of the Republican Party, they all supported the war with Bill Clinton.
But it was sort of the right-wing rabble out in flyover country that just… They couldn’t just see following Bill Clinton into any war was what it was really about, right? If it had been President McCain or President Bush leading it, they would have more or less supported it probably. But I don’t think…
Well, I don’t want to sell them short. I mean, there were definitely… Antiwar.com was killing it back then. That was when they got their real start.
I mean, they were already going in 95, but that was when they got their real start. And they really were the stars of the anti-Kosovo war movement during that time. I remember I had already been exposed to antiwar.com a little bit, but I remember listening to AM radio in San Antonio, 550 AM, and the callers would call in and go, oh, that’s not true. They debunked that on antiwar.com this morning.
So that was where they were really getting going. And there were people who specialized in what is really going on here, but… Not as much as you’d like, because it is so complicated, the breakup of Yugoslavia. You’ve got to really dive in to know.
It’s very hard for people to do much about. But you know what, though? There was a real lack of enthusiasm for the thing. And when they tried to get an authorization passed, they couldn’t in the Congress.
So there was enough conservative dissent, even though Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, the leaders of the Republicans at that time, supported it. the rank and file, you know, were with Ron Paul and that one, at least for, at least when it came to the vote, they didn’t have, you know, enough votes there. It was close, I guess. But then I guess what I’m really saying is it’s all wrapped up in partisanship, right? Because then W.
Bush comes in and from the point of view of a liberal Democrat or a leftist of any kind, a progressive or anybody on the left side of the spectrum, Well, this numbskull is from Houston, Texas, they thought, right? Meaning just he represents oil interests. Evil, icky energy corporations is, you know, he’s just kind of all over him. And so they just didn’t trust that.
They just saw that as as corrupt and him as inept, which, of course, is true. And the guy’s IQ is probably 90 or something. He’s a horrible governor, a horrible president and a horrible idiot. And so if you weren’t a Republican who was invested in wanting to believe in this guy or trying to somehow caricature him as the second coming of Reagan, you know, the Democrats always try to pretend their new guy is like John Kennedy in some way.
And they, you know, there were people who really wanted to believe in W. Bush. But for everybody else, it was like, come on, man. You know, it was so blatant.
He was so ham-handed in his BS-ery that you’d have had to really want to be in on believing in the thing to go along with it. And then… Oh, so you’re telling me once, you know, after America gets hit by Egyptians working for a Saudi hiding in Afghanistan, you want to hit Iraq? All right, then.
And so… you know for people again on the right they’re like oh yeah terrorist enemy but on the left they’re going well this guy just wants to steal oil now the truth is he just wanted to steal oil for Israel that was what the whole plan was just for Israel to save a nickel a barrel it wasn’t for us at all it was the clean break plan for the Israelis um but uh So for liberals, it was just it was too easy. Right. If you remember at that time, you had, you know, every nitwit in Hollywood coming out and saying, well, George Bush is a bad guy and they’re lying us into war. And this is all a bunch of crap.
And even though they were a bunch of liberal idiots, they were right. It was just because they weren’t invested in him. They could see right through how dishonest the whole thing was. And so, you know, I protested here in Austin with 50,000 people on February 15th and March 15th of 2003 trying to stop the war.
And I’m from this town and I’ve been at some leftist protests before. But I remember thinking, Jesus, where did all these people come from? Like, what school did they all go to? Like, I’m from here.
Like, there’s so many hippies. It was unbelievable how many people, and they weren’t all hippies, but how many people, virtually all leftists, were out there protesting. It was huge. And so it was just the consensus on the left that we don’t have to do this.
And it was only, you know, the poll numbers only really shifted when the war became inevitable because people felt under such pressure to support the war. If we’re going to have a war, then you got to be for it. So even Pat Buchanan, you know, who, you know, our favorite paleo con anti-war guy who founded the American conservative magazine to try to stop the war. Once the war started, he goes, well, you know, of course, you got to support the troops out in the war.
Right. So everybody was. The social psychology of that public pressure to go along was really intense. And so once the war was absolutely inevitable weeks away, then the poll numbers really shifted to 60, 70 percent support and belief in the thing and whatever, because people didn’t want to be on the outside of that.
Well, you’re not on Saddam Hussein side, are you? Well, geez, no. I just wanted to give the inspectors more time to work or whatever. But if we’re going anyway, then, of course, hoorah, you know.
And then so opposition to W. Bush’s war really was Democratic Party based that whole time. I mean, if you look at Cindy Sheehan, who is the absolute most sincere anti-war protester in history, you had all these absolute cynical grifters climbing on her back to try to get their political power. And so, you know, particularly for the Democrats to win the midterms of 2006, all these huge, you know, this huge movement sort of glom on to the trend of being anti Iraq war at that time.
It was good politics to do so. And then, you know, it wasn’t even Barack Obama. It was just Nancy Pelosi when she won. And when the Democrats re-won the House and the Senate in 2006 and took power in 07, That was it.
Antiwar movement. Forget that. And it was like it’s it’s a real miracle. It’s a lesson in in American Democratic Party politics where they can just turn these protest groups on and off like a switch, basically.
And once they got their power back in 07, they just turned it off. And that was it for the Democrat antiwar movement at that time before Obama ever even got there.
Hovik: Would I be correct in saying that the thing was so. tied to 9-11 where Americans perceived it as close to home, but also it was a little bit far from Israel. So people could safely, without criticizing Israel, you know, criticize the war. Do you think that’s a factor or maybe I’m misreading it?
Scott: Well, I mean, so fast forward a bit to, you know, just the protests over the last year and a half. You had, you know, really extensive protests on the campuses during Democrat times. Right. I mean, this was the left half of the left really going or maybe the left three quarters of the left going after the very center left.
It seems more and more. On the Democrat side, like it’s not just the leftists, but it’s just Democrat voters are absolutely sick and tired of Israel and their cruelty and subsidizing it, participating in it. But then the owners of the Democratic Party and the donors and the billionaires who keep the whole thing going. I mean, this is there’s nothing prejudiced to say this.
It’s just true. It’s in the Wall Street Journal that like there literally are just a small handful of Zionist Jews who finance the entire or two thirds of the Democratic Party. You know, they take in donations from regular people. They also have a very small handful of pro-Zionists who pony up billions to run the thing.
And that’s it. So they get their way. So you have, you know, in 2010, I think it was. No, I guess it would have been 2012.
They had a convention in L.A. So the Barack Obama’s second convention. And they had a resolution that was pro-Israel. And they did the yeas and nays in the convention.
And the nays had it. I mean, it was thunder in there. And then the chair was the mayor of L.A. at the time. Sorry, I forget his name, Hispanic fellow.
And he, you can see on the footage, he doesn’t know what to do because the yeas are like a quarter to three quarters nays in the room or something. It’s just thunder, says nay. And then he looks over to his left and he goes, the eyes have it. And everyone’s like, what?
You know, so like that that is has been the case is going to be the case on the Democratic side where they have this huge crack up going on over Israel, Palestine. But now still, you might ask, geez, isn’t it weird how after the Republican president took power? The one that they hate more than any Republican at all of all. And then his ceasefire breaks down, the Israelis violate it and restart the bombing campaign again.
Well, where are all the leftist protests now? I mean, the colleges are terrified, so the colleges are clamping down. But, you know, the kids could just organize at school and then go protest down at the Capitol building, right? Like a lot of these capital cities are university towns, too, or they could go protest at their local city council or something.
They could do something. And I don’t know, maybe maybe I really don’t realize the extent of the threat of college administrators about what they’re going to do to these kids if they keep protesting. But it raises the question about the control of these groups where they can really just turn them on and off like this. It’s reminiscent of like Serbia and Georgia and Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and the color code of revolutions where you have these, you know, very well financed mobs of student groups and young kids out protesting and then accept when they want them not to.
And then they’re gone. And I got a great example of this was during January 6th. How come there were no leftists at the Capitol on January 6th waging a counter protest against the right who were there to protest in favor of Trump? And the answer is there was a Time magazine article where they talked about all how they fortified the election, which they’re really just describing how they stole it.
And they talk about, for example, they were able to control these groups and tell them yes or no what to do, which way to go, when to go and when to leave. And on January 6th, they sent out text messages. Somehow all of these leftist groups, I mean, we’re talking Antifa and Black Bloc who, you know, fancy themselves communist leftist revolutionaries and all this stuff. They’re getting a text message on their phone from Democrat Party, you know, HQ from George Soros’s, you know, little smithers.
They’re telling them don’t go today. We have this handled. We know what we’re doing. We’re doing it without us.
So every leftist stay home from January 6th. And then what happened? Every leftist stayed home from January 6th. Nobody showed up because the switch had been turned off.
We’re doing it. We’re not doing the left. We’re trapping the right this time. And we don’t need leftist actors on there giving them an excuse.
So everybody stay away. And they all stayed away. But meanwhile, they can flip the switch on and they’ll burn Washington, D.C. to the ground. You know, if you just look at just a few months before, these were the same people who were rioting in Washington,
Hovik: you know? Yeah. So you mentioned the flipping the switch and we feel a lot like it because we had a little color revolution in Armenia as well. Yeah, it is definitely that I can relate to our Armenians can relate as well.
But, you know, given you mentioned color revolutions, actually, let’s talk about your latest book. It’s called Provoked, How Washington Started the Cold War, the New Cold War with Russia. and the catastrophe in Ukraine. It is a sweeping 700-page indictment of US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. You draw on declassified records, memoirs, mainstream sources, and you argue that decades of broken promises, NATO expansion, and interference in Russia’s neighborhood set stage for the 2022 war.
The book is great, in my opinion, and it has earned high praise across the political spectrum. So, also, it’s not a quick read. I am still going through it, but I think it’s essential for anyone to try to understand how we got here. First of all, Respect, 700 pages.
Can I just ask how long it took you to write it?
Scott: About two years, maybe two and a half, but I have a lot of other projects, so there are times where I had to just stop working on it for a while in a row and then get back to it. The Hamas War was like a four-month setback until I just quit Twitter and just went full-on to the book. I was lucky. At the time, I finally quit, but I did have a radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles for about 15 years.
So… When I decided to quit Twitter and just get full back to the book, I decided, well, once a week, I’m going to interview one of my guys from antiwar.com to talk all about Gaza on the radio in L.A. And that way… I’m doing my part to cover that war on the best platform that I have.
Most people can hear me. And I’m just going to spend the rest of the time tuning it out and just reading my history and reading all these books and writing this book. So overall, it took me about two and a half years, I guess.
Hovik: Okay. And just reading the subtitle, you claim that the U.S. started a new Cold War. Do you think that there was ever a moment of real opportunity for lasting peace with Russia after the Cold War ended? Oh, yeah, of course.
I mean… What was the sort of decision boundary after which it was sort of a point of no return, in your opinion?
Scott: Well… I mean… At what point did the invasion and Russia’s, you know, complete break with the West, you know, really when was like the very last draw? I mean, not really until the invasion in 22.
I mean, you could say it would have been, you know, maybe the ouster of Trump the first time, which they really did cheat and screw him in 2020. I mean, he’s overall he’s really won three times. They intervened so massively against him in 20 the same way they did in 16. So that may have been it.
Once Joe Biden got in there, we were just screwed after that. There’s no way he was going to be able to… He just didn’t have the motive. He didn’t want to see the conflict resolved.
He wanted to see it exploited. But through all of the missteps of H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, W. Bush, and Barack Obama, and for that matter, for Donald Trump and what he did wrong in his first term to make things worse, which he did some things, I think it was still all… reversible, could have been saved.
In fact, especially, you know, if he is take Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, just take away all that Russiagate hype and just have him treated like he’s just any other president. You know, I remember when in December of 2000, when the Supreme Court finally decided we’re going to stop recounting the votes. We hereby say that George Bush won Florida. And then on every channel, including MSNBC and CNN, every news girl clicked her heels and said, President-elect George W.
Bush today. That’s it. We all respect him as the legitimate winner of the process because the guy said, and that’s it. Right.
And they just you know, they did not all favor Bush. They mostly would have preferred that Al Gore had won that thing. And hell, they had some pretty legitimate objections to the way that that race had been called. You know, in fact, it turned out we only found out about a month after September 11th.
They finally finished their final recount. And Al Gore won Florida, right? I mean, that is what happened was they stopped the recount before they were done and they gave it to W. Bush.
Oh, well, and I’m no Al Gore partisan. I’m just saying everyone on TV was like, this guy W. Bush is as legitimate as any leader has ever been. So say we all right.
Like they just whatever. That’s the job is to support the regime. Well, Donald Trump comes in and they go, nope, this guy’s an infection. The regime must come together to prevent him from having power, even though he had won the election.
And they convinced themselves that it’s just such an aberration. Hillary should have won. Somehow he stole it. It was either the Russians or it was the Facebook ads or it was the some kind of thing that made him illegitimate, even though.
Donald Trump is Americana, man. Donald Trump is the golden arches. He’s Coca-Cola classic. Are you kidding me?
He’s Michael Jackson and Madonna and Tony Hawk and everything of the 1980s. He is American culture. He was always… You know, put forward to American TV and movie audiences as like the epitome of American yuppies success.
Right. He gets a cameo in Home Alone 2. He’s mentioned in rap lyrics like twice a year or whatever for. our whole lives. Right.
The guy is he’s the most famous billionaire. I mean, certainly now he’s the most famous American who ever lived. But even then, he was a mega star. Right.
What they call not a superstar because a superstar is just like Elizabeth Taylor. A mega star is like Donald Trump or Michael Jackson or like that piece of crap from U2 or what, you know, these people who are just absolutely huge. Right. I mean, So, and in fact, this is how I knew he was going to win the election when I read that The Apprentice had been on for 14 seasons.
Now, gentlemen, I got to tell you, I don’t watch primetime broadcast TV, but I know that Americans do. And 14 seasons? Are you kidding me? I didn’t even know that.
But once I did read that, I was like, oh, well, he’s just going to win. I mean, what are you going to do? This guy, people know him. They feel like they know him.
In a way, you know, like like only you can like you relate to your most personal, like your favorite sports broadcast or your your or your, you know, FM morning show on your drive to work for the last 20 years. The same two guys, Bob and Jim or whatever they are in your town who do the morning drive. You know what I mean? Like people really know Trump.
Of course he won against Hillary Clinton, the most hated woman in the society. That’s who you ran. But they said, nope, it must have been stolen. It couldn’t have been legit that the most famous American ever won as the Republican.
You know, it’s completely crazy the way that they did that. But then what that meant then, too, was it really poisoned the brains of Democrats. Right. Because.
It meant that. Instead of. like during W. Bush kind of rallying against him and his government and what he was doing with it. Instead, they rallied around the government to protect the people from the elected leader of the government, right?
So it was just like if you take Egypt in 2013. So they won their revolution in 2011. And what was the revolution? The revolution was four elections.
From now on in Egypt, this 5,000-year-old civilization, from now on, we’re gonna have regular elections. And on the first time, the Muslim Brotherhood won for the parliamentary election and the presidential election. They won barely. I mean, we’re talking 50 point 51 percent type numbers, right?
They just barely squeaked it out. And then what did the liberals do? The left side, I mean, the split is not perfect, but there’s a pretty okay analogy between the left and right in America, between the religious Muslim Brotherhood on one side and basically all of the intellectuals from city life and the labor union types and the university types and everybody on the more social democratic liberal side.
And then what did they all do? instead of busting their asses to consolidate political parties and alliances and build a democratic left to face the Muslim Brotherhood in the next elections, They took Saudi money to go outside and protest and cry and say that they hate the Republicans so much that they prefer that the military dictatorship come back, which they happily obliged them. After one and a half years in the summer of 2013, the military came in over through the Muslim Brotherhood and said, we’re here to answer your call. You desperately asked for your military dictatorship to return.
Because you can’t stand waiting to try again to win an election. So you’re just going to come turn to us. Well, that’s what the American Democrats did. That’s the exact same thing as Donald Trump winning.
It’s like the Muslim Brotherhood won here. And the American Democrats said, no, we side with the military, in this case, the CIA and FBI, national security state, framing this guy to limit his power, if not outright overthrow him. just because they didn’t like losing the election. And then instead of working hard to make sure they win the next one, they could win the next one. They just sided with the state, which ended up siding with them again.
And really, as we said, already screwed him in 20. But they were unable they were unable to hold back the tide in 24 because they were cheating. Right. They had to cheat.
It didn’t quite work to stop him in the first the first time it did the second time. But cheaters never win ultimately. Right. They could be rid of him by now.
And now he’s in the first year of his what could have been his third term here when
Hovik: he could be at home. So, Scott, you in your book, you extensively document the use of color revolutions as part of a U.S. foreign policy tool set and how the sequence of these color revolutions set stage for the war in Ukraine. Can you give us a little bit more detail on how, let’s say, the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Euromaidan in Ukraine in 2014 fit into that sequence? Sure.
Scott: So the color revolutions really start out, uh, with the Clinton administration in the Balkans and they intervene in Albania and in, um, in, I guess in, I think it’s Slovakia, but the, the okay. 98 campaign was one. Um, and then, which I don’t think that really counts as the Balkans, but anyway, um, maybe it does. I don’t know. Um, But then they also intervene in Croatia in ‘99 against Tudjman, who had been their guy, who then they stabbed in the back.
But he ended up dying right before the election anyway. But then in 2000, they did the bulldozer revolution against Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia to overthrow him. And then they went to Georgia in 2003 with the Rose Revolution, as you mentioned. So the template for these…
It’s not perfect because the situations vary. But basically what it is is they’re targeting countries that are like semi-democratic, right? They have regular elections, but they’re still pretty corrupt and got strongmen leaders and so forth and ones that are independent from the United States and American foreign policy interests.
And so what they do is they normally what happens is they dispute an election and they’ll have their own pollsters their own exit pollsters um and all their own political operatives and poll watchers and so forth and they’ll just come out and announce well our exit polls say that our guy should win by 23 points And then when the strongman wins again, whether through ballot box stuffing or not, they go, ah, see, they’re lying and they’re the ones stealing the election. And so then you have a massive protest and a refusal to go alone. In the case of Georgia in 03, I think it probably really was essentially like that because.
Asbed: It was almost exactly like that last year in 2024.
Scott: Yeah. Well, I know three. What happened was the president’s party got second and the dissidents party got first. they said well you know on our further analysis and recount and balloting it was this other third party that got second place so now the national governor first place so or no i guess second so now the national government the ruling party is going to make their coalition government with this other party not with the opposition and the opposition guys then held a big riot and this is the joke right is that you Regardless of how corrupt the Shevardnadze regime was at that time, which they were very corrupt.
He’s the former Soviet foreign minister, was the president at that time. No matter how corrupt he was or what he was trying to do in getting away with his shenanigans to try to stay in power there. The opposition party that was getting screwed, they didn’t have the power to do anything about it, except for the fact that the United States of America stepping in and allied with George Soros and four or five different organizations run and financed by him, including the International Renaissance Foundation, the Soros Foundation and others. So.
And then USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute, and all of them were all involved as well. And it was George Soros. In fact, it was Tucker Carlson’s father writing for Voice of America who explained it was George Soros who bought all the roses, had them shipped in, you know, from outside the country, you know, trucks full of roses for everyone to have for the big protest, for the symbol of the protest movement and everything. And then they ended up just essentially storming the parliament, chasing the president out of town and seizing power for themselves.
And then Shaakashvili, you know, was a loyal American sock puppet, but ended up going crazy and starting a war in 2008 after Bush promised not officially, but unofficially, but sort of officially to semi-officially invite them into NATO someday. The thing is, is they had an outstanding border dispute with these two breakaway provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And so he thought what he would do is go ahead and resolve that border dispute with violence now so he could get into NATO later.
And that and I think he had some encouragement from the vice president’s office and from John McCain’s campaign staff and others kind of encouraging him and. He ended up launching this attack in August 2008, which the Russians quickly crushed. Notably, Dick Cheney advised W. Bush to fire missiles at the Roki Tunnel to collapse the tunnel onto the Russian troops coming under the Caucasus Mountains.
And W. Bush and Stephen Hadley shut that down and said, no, we’re not doing that. But so the promise to bring Georgia into NATO almost led directly to a war between NATO and the Russian Federation within four months over Georgia. um then in um in 2005 they did the uh failed denim revolution in Belarus the successful lemon or tulip revolution in Kyrgyzstan and the sort of half successful cedar revolution in Lebanon… In Kyrgyzstan, it was basically, you know, an ethnic riot where, you know, the country is very divided between North and South.
And so the Americans just paid a bunch of agitators on the Southern side to riot over, you know, policies that they didn’t like from the new guy. And by the way, they had supported, like somebody said, you’re so full of it. Some guy on Twitter, you don’t know what you’re talking about because, or maybe it was just an emailer to me. You know what you’re talking about?
Because I read that America supported the government in Kyrgyzstan in 2003. And I just said, so yeah, well, how many times around the sun did the earth go between then and the time that America overthrew the SOB? Because… They turned on him.
This is exactly what happened. 2003, nothing. In 2005, they overthrew the guy. And they did, too. And I quote in the book, it’s actually kind of hilarious.
The Wall Street Journal has this huge article about how, yeah, we’re gearing up to overthrow this guy. And then… Like five days after it’s done, the New York Times runs a big article about, yep, we just overthrew this guy. All right.
And they’re both like these giant like 5000 word pieces that just have all of these details and quotes and official admissions and bragging and boasting about how we’re the ones who get this done. And so then in and oh, and I skipped, I’m sorry, in 2004, of course, was the famous Orange Revolution in Ukraine. And this is the one where, you know, again, I think Yanukovych probably was stealing it. He was the designated successor of Leonid Kuchma, who is the outgoing president at that time.
And it looks like Kuchma’s guys probably were trying to stuff ballot boxes and and drive people around to vote multiple times and whatever to make sure that he won. But then the Americans intervened massively. I mean, with hundreds of millions of dollars in supporting these NGOs and this massive carnival, all of these giant orange flags and flat screen TVs and, you know, heaters and hot food and entertainment and all of this stuff. to keep people out there. In fact, they had these polystyrene boards, they can lay on the ground that are really great from insulating from the cold.
So you can just lay this board down on the ground, it’s kind of soft foam rubber type thing, and then just put your tent around that, put your sleeping bag on top of that, and you can sleep outside in the cold, you know, and keep you insulated from the cold of the ground. All of that was supplied by foreign money, hundreds of millions of dollars worth to you know, hold this, essentially this giant carnival to build up support. And then they pressured the government every way they possibly could.
And they used American trained lawyers on the Supreme court decided that they just invented this completely unconstitutional third round of voting so they could hold another vote. And then that time they decided that the American backed side one, Victor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, And yet, once they took power, they immediately turned on each other, almost immediately turned on each other over Timoshenko trying to make a deal with the Russians over their natural gas supplies and transport through the country. And they drove the country into the ground. And they were both thrown out.
In the next election in 2006, just two years later, Yanukovych, the guy that they stopped, became prime minister. And in fact, part of their deal in 04 was that… the dissident Yushchenko can have the presidency, but they have to strengthen the prime ministership. So then, or no, I guess, Maybe they were the ones pushing for strengthening the prime ministership because Timoshenko was going to get that role. But then just within a couple of years, now their rival, their hated rival Yanukovych is in there.
And now he’s got the newly enhanced powers of the presidency of the prime ministership. And then he runs for president in 2010. And he crushes Yushchenko, who gets like 5% or less in the first round. And Yushchenko is, Yanukovych is elected in the election of 2010.
And with the help of Paul Manafort, who is a notorious American political advisor and lobbyist who supports pretty unsavory regimes. He and Roger Stone and their other associates supported unsavory regimes around the world and helped get him in power. And as long as we’re now finally on Ukraine, it’s good I saved Ukraine for last for the color-coded revolutions there because even though I skipped around a little bit, Because, I mean, this is the story that we’re on here. And so basically what happened was in 2014, well, first of all, in 2010, Paul Manafort helped the guy win.
Now, people listening to this might be familiar with Paul Manafort from the claims that he was Vladimir Putin’s secret agent controlling Donald Trump. He came to be Donald Trump’s campaign manager in 2016. And they went, aha, this guy worked with Yanukovych. And everybody knows Yanukovych ain’t nothing but a sock puppet of Vladimir Putin.
And so that means that Paul Manafort is Vladimir Putin’s secret agent controlling Trump. Ain’t that fun. And every liberal Democrat woman in America all believed it because it all fits together, you see. And yet the thing of it was that Paul Manafort obviously was working for American interests.
That was why he worked for Yanukovych, as he was trying to move him west. And Yanukovych was going along with it, wanted to do so as well. And I urge people, if you’re interested in this stuff, to watch this great interview that Manafort did with Patrick Bette David, the famous podcaster guy. And in that interview, and he’s just telling the truth, like he’s so obviously sincere here, and there’s plenty of other information to corroborate, you know, what he’s talking about, what he explains that.
His whole purpose in helping Yanukovych win in 2010 was to move him west. And the first thing they did after he won was they went to Brussels, not to Moscow. And what was going on there was people say, oh, the Russian backed party of regions or the Russian leaning party of regions. But in fact, it was an Eastern party and was controlled by corrupt Eastern Ukrainian oligarchs.
However, they wanted to move west, too. They were not just Russian sock puppets themselves. They were sick and tired of being treated like the redheaded stepchild by the Russian oligarchs. And also the situation in business and politics in Ukraine is so corrupt.
It’s the kind of thing where when the new president wins, he might just nationalize your company and give it to his brother-in-law. And this kind of just total kleptocracy, crazy stuff. And this is what was happening to the Eastern oligarchs businesses. So what they wanted to do was try to push Ukraine into this association agreement with the EU, which is not full membership, but a beginning on the path to membership to the EU, because the rules of EU membership preclude that kind of agreement. instability in the economy, right?
That kind of just overt corruption to that degree. And they were sick and tired of being pushed around by the Russians. So that was why Manafort was even there. If you take a look at the guy, I’m not saying he was CIA because I don’t know that.
And I guess maybe he wasn’t CIA. But if you look at the guy, you might think that he was with his very fancy suits and cuff links and everything. Like he definitely would fit in with the agency guys. He clearly… was representing American and Western interests here.
There is no indication whatsoever that his goal here was to help Russia accomplish anything. And if you listen to that interview of Patrick Pet David, he makes his position absolutely clear. He goes, listen, when I’m doing this, it doesn’t matter anyway, because George W. Bush and Barack Obama were getting along with Vladimir Putin at that time.
So it’s not like I was doing even anything that I was doing was helping him in any way or was like meant to be some kind of compromise with him. That ain’t treason. Y’all didn’t make up all this. We hate Putin so much stuff until after 2014 and the loss of Crimea.
And, you know, even later than that. So. But if you watch that interview with Patrick Bet-David and Paul Manafort, it makes it very clear what his interests were and what Yanukovych was trying to do. Yanukovych was trying to move West, trying to move away from Russia, not doing the loyal bidding of Vladimir Putin.
So then in 2014, well, first of all, in the fall of 2013, He’s made a deal or he’s making a deal to join the EU. And, you know, Reuters has this report where he faces down his cabinet. He goes, I don’t want to hear anything more about it. All of you just shut your trap.
The decision is made. The deal is done. We’re making the deal with the EU. OK, so everybody just shut up and leave me alone about it.
That’s what we’re doing. But then. Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, she’s the one who screwed everything up. And I have that on the authority of George Soros and Henry Kissinger, both who George Soros said, oh, this is typical Angela Merkel overreaching.
Jeez. You know, you can hear the disdain in his voice when he talks about how she absolutely botched this negotiation because she is playing too hard a hardball with Ukraine. Listen, Ukraine, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to get just a five billion dollar loan, which is just barely enough to roll over your debt from last year.
Right. To pay your interest from last year. You’re not really getting any relief whatsoever from us or from the IMF. And by the way, you’re going to have to completely slash your pension program.
You’re going to have to slash your gasoline subsidies for poor people and all this stuff and do this severe austerity regime and give all the money to us. And then Putin comes in and says, well, oh, and you can’t if you’re going to have a deal with us, you can’t have a deal with Russia. And Putin comes in and he was mixed signals on this. He said publicly, we don’t care if you have a deal with them.
But I think privately he was telling them, no, if you have a deal with them, you can’t have a deal with us either. He was worried about, you know, the Russian market being flooded with cheaper finished European Union and stuff. It was protectionist policy, basically. And for Eastern Ukraine and for Russia.
And so and then Putin said, look, I’ll give you a 15 billion dollar loan at a sweet low interest rate. And I’ll cut you a deal. We can settle on our on your outstanding gas debts to me for, you know, they had stolen a bunch of gas and not paid transit fees and all this stuff. So he said, we can work out all the oil dispute.
Well, I guess it’s the Russians that owe them the transfer fees. Anyway, we can resolve all of that. And I’ll give you a big loan if you just stick with me and not the EU Association. And now Henry Kissinger, I cited Soros and his disdain, Kissinger as well.
Said, oh, my God, I can’t believe the way you guys did this. And he said, listen, if you were being serious about this and you really wanted to do a trade deal with Ukraine where you’re, you know, doing this soft integration with the EU. And you’re really trying to do this well. then this would take place over a series of years of negotiations with Ukraine and Russia and all of the most important players involved. Germany and everyone else would be sitting at conference tables hammering this thing out over a period of years. in order to get this right.
And instead you do this rush job thing where it’s absolutely like just insultingly at Russian expense in this way. It was absolutely stupid to do it. You force this guy to turn back the other way. And that’s, you know, the leaders of America’s expansionist movement in Eastern Europe.
Just saying that it was people on the Western side would overplay their hand and screwed everything up. So then… Once Yanukovych announces that he’s postponing signing the deal, that’s it. It’s basically he’s announcing that it’s off.
And then you had people from the west of the country who I don’t know how determined they really were to have a deal with the EU. But what they were determined was to not have a new deal with Russia, which they saw as keeping Ukraine essentially subsumed under Russia. uh you know Russian control and so they’re you know they’re the country is very divided culturally or what’s what was the country then not what’s left of it now um was very divided uh about all of this stuff and so there were people who leaned toward Russia the vast majority of the country opposed membership in nato but you know membership in the eu was closer to 50 50.
And for people in the far west of the country, they absolutely supported it and they absolutely hated the idea of turning away from the deal and sticking with the Russians. So I mean, it’s no coincidence. It literally was a George Soros guy who originally called for the protest movement on the Maidan. A guy named Mustafa, whatever the hell, I’m sorry, I forget.
Kadima, something like that. No, that was Ariel Sharon’s party. Mustafa something. But…
Again, you have the same thing again with the USAID, the NED, IRI and NDI and all of the George Soros organizations, including other NGOs backed by America’s allies in Western Europe, poured tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting this massive you know, carnival type protest movement over from the end of November through December and January and February, right through the coldest of the winter of 2013 and 14. You had all these people out there by the tens and hundreds of thousands.
And the government screwed up. themselves, you know, the provocateurs attacked police at the very beginning and then the government clamped down and tried to cleanse the square, you know, clean everybody out of there. And that just caused a big reaction and caused more people to come. At one point in January, the protest movement was kind of running out of steam. People were starting to go home.
And then the government passed a new law outlawing protest, or at least, you know, clamping down, passing all new restrictions on protests. And that brought everybody right back out again. You know, so they had their own role in their ham-handed approach to dealing with the situation. Now, the coup d’etat, as it’s often referred to, was really a coup de something.
I don’t know exactly which French term for a coup it was when Joe Biden sends Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan’s wife, to essentially strong arm the president into firing his entire government and hiring the protest leaders to be the government while they’re waiting on new elections by the end of the year. That was their compromise in overthrowing the guy. And finally, he gave in to that. And the promise was that he would withdraw his police and the protesters would go home.
The leaders of the protest movement would join the government and they would hold new elections. Well, he pulled his… police back, but the protesters didn’t go along with any of the rest of it.
And what happened was when the protest leaders went up on the stage at the Maidan and announced that, hey, we’ve signed this new deal, this new compromise, a neo-Nazi named Tarasiuk, who was admittedly, and from multiple sources, the leader of the snipers from the music conservatory that started killing police and escalating the crisis the day before or two days before, He’s the same guy who ran up on the stage and grabbed the microphone out of one of the protest leader’s hands and said, oh, no, we don’t accept any deal where the president stays. And in fact, if he’s not gone by 10 a.m. tomorrow, I’ll kill him myself.
And the crowd goes, yeah, yeah, come on, let’s kill him. And, you know, huge riotous crowd. And then the next morning they went to go kill the guy and the cops were all gone. They had already fled.
I think their leaders had gotten out of there. And so the lower down guys said, well, forget this and got on buses and got out of town. So they didn’t just withdraw from the Maidan. They just withdrew from downtown.
And so then the protesters were able to sack all the government buildings and and chase the president out of town. And as soon as he left town. John Kerry’s State Department recognized the new government as being the legitimate government of the country and, you know, recognized the push there. And so it was, you know, it was a it was a coup day Newland on the international level and a right wing Nazi street push when it came down to, you know, the final regime change is how it was done.
And then this led immediately to the loss of Crimea and the outbreak of war in the east of the country and all that. But maybe I’ll stop and give you a chance to direct the conversation your own way here.
Hovik: Sure, sure. Yeah, as I say, the rest is history or the rest is current events that we’re seeing now. But let’s come to Armenia.
Asbed: Well, Kovig, before you go to Armenia, can I also ask a question about All this money that you’ve been talking about, Scott, that is the NGO money, the Soros money and everything. Are these basically substitutes inside our foreign aid that basically is a way of affecting things abroad without the American government being responsible for or accountable for it? Yeah. And also I want you to sound off a little bit on the whole USAID closure and if it’s for real or if it’s a show or what’s going on.
Scott: Sure. Okay. So first of all, for people who aren’t familiar with George Soros, you know, he gets a bad rap from the right as being some kind of communist. And which is, you know, really a rabbit trail.
That’s not what it is. What he is is actually a fervent anti-communist center right. Pardon me. Center left liberal Democrat, sort of a Cold War Democrat in the Harry Truman model.
He hated Soviet communism and he worked very hard to undermine it when it was still around. He says, you know, his goal in the world is. to create open societies. That’s his, you know, liberal democracies. And, you know, the Open Society Institute is one of them.
And so It is very nefarious in a lot of ways, but if you ask him, it’s all very justified. He’s just doing the right thing to help spread open societies and liberal democracies in the world. And the fact that he’s most interested in doing that in countries that are outside of America’s foreign policy consensus is just a coincidence. And in fact, I show in the book where You know, America, for example, supported the dictator in, as you guys know, in Azerbaijan, as well as in Uzbekistan.
And so but USAID and NED, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, they don’t mess around in Azerbaijan or in Uzbekistan. But Soros does. even though these are, you know, American-friendly places. Soros would go in there. In other words, there is a degree of true believer here where he’s not 100% married to the State Department and their goals.
He’s willing to go in there and be disruptive even in countries that are compliant with American wishes. Although, you know, I’m sure not to the same degree. But essentially… You know, he he very often and openly, you know, in their words and in his words, he very often operates essentially as an adjunct of the State Department.
Right. He is there as to to as like a multiplier for American so-called soft power. Because he’s got these huge organizations and he’s more nimble than a government group. He can hire and fire and pass out money to people that he thinks are going to be effective in certain things much easier.
State Department officials said, you know, we coordinate with Britain, France, Germany and George Soros. when we’re working on our foreign policy. So this is not, and some people take this wrong, but they’re just wrong. This is not like picking on some guy because he’s a rich Jew. There are a lot of rich Jews that don’t have politics.
This guy not just has politics, but his life’s mission is to move the world. He has the biggest politics on the planet and is, you know, All glory to him. He’s determined to write his name in the pages of history here. So you don’t get to then turn around and say, oh, come on, don’t pick on poor little old George.
Yeah, no, he is a self-described man. you know, ruler of the planet and adjunct of the State Department of, you know, the foreign ministry of the most powerful world empire here. Right. So there’s no mistaking what it is that he’s doing. It’s he is exercising power.
Right. Not sitting around collecting royalties and dividend checks. Well, he’s retired now, but only in the last year.
Asbed: Yeah, they have a succession issue going on right now, as far as I know.
Scott: Oh, that’s good. Let them fight to the death.
Asbed: What about USAID?
Scott: He’s played a very active role in all of this stuff. And I’m sorry, go ahead.
Asbed: What about USAID?
Scott: Yeah, so USAID, I mean, I think it’s hilarious.
Asbed: I should be saying USAID. Hovey just criticized me before for saying USAID. It sounds like we’re giving goodwill aid or something like that. No, USAID.
Scott: Well, and there is a little bit of that, but even that is mostly just window dressing, right? Like soft power can be AIDS medicine, but it’s mostly what it is is overthrowing your government if it’s not compliant. So, you know, let’s not like get confused about what they’re really doing.
Hovik: Or vaccines as vaccines acting as DNA collection mechanisms, you know. Yeah. Oh, God. No.
Scott: knows what you know yeah i think when they say oh they’re you know they’re doing a trans play down in peru or whatever no they’re just stealing money like i guarantee
Hovik: that never happened right before someone i’m talking about when they discovered where bin laden was by injecting people with yeah so sorry about that i didn’t mean to mention vaccines now that we’re gonna get banned you know i’m glad you brought
Scott: that up because in fact you know what they did was that actually wasn’t even true They blamed, they claimed that that was how they knew he was there, was from the WHO going around doing vaccines. And then, but it wasn’t. It was a different doctor that got his DNA off a hairbrush. But what they did was they hung this albatross around the neck of the WHO and this one doctor.
And I think he was killed. And then the WHO was ran out of town. And it was nothing but the CIA’s cover story. Interesting.
That wasn’t even how they got the DNA anyway. They’re such bastards, those guys. God. Anyway, so USAID, when Trump came in this time and Elon Musk did this doge thing, USAID immediately, like, tried to fight them and tried to clamp down and hide everything.
And so that just peeped the Doge group’s curiosity of what’s really going on here. And that was how they made themselves a target and then got themselves exposed. And so it’s really great because you got like this guy, Mike Benz, who’s this former State Department official from the first Trump administration, who’s just going off and explaining, connecting all the dots and explaining how USAID runs all these different organizations and controls these political parties and foreign corporations and NGOs and all these things all around the world.
And so it really goes to show that they are You know, essentially, they’re like a junior CIA or like an open CIA. The joke is, and they explain this in The Washington Post and other places back then with the creation of USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, that when the CIA operates foreign sock puppets, it actually almost always gets exposed. And then when someone is exposed as being backed by the CIA, it just completely blows up their credibility. Right.
So the secrecy is actually counterproductive. And what they figured out was it’s better to just give the money out openly and say, that’s right. We’re just here to support democracy. Here’s 50 million dollars for your group.
As long as your group is supporting the guy that we want you to support, you’re paid. And they say that it’s just about democracy itself, but of course, it’s all about making sure the right guy wins. As simple as that. I mean, imagine a world where America goes around supporting, creating democratic institutions, but not giving a damn who wins and whether that person is compliant with American goals or not.
Yeah, right. The whole thing, of course, is about rigging the game for our side. See, Egypt 2011, I think. Yeah.
Well, so in Egypt in 2011, now they had been working on this for a while because they knew that Hosni Mubarak, the American backed sock puppet dictator, they knew that he was getting old and was going to have to go. But his son, Gamal, was like ineffectual and was not believable to be his replacement. So they were trying to figure out, well, like, who can we move in to be the military dictator after him? And there were some, including, you know, some of these neoconservatives believe their own BS about spreading democracy and stuff.
And Robert Kagan is one, for example, who supported even the Muslim Brotherhood in power. He said they were democratically elected. These guys are not terrorists. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, they’re basically like old men, property owners and lawyers and doctors and stuff.
They’re not young radicals. So like, what the hell, we can deal with them. They won the election. Let’s give them a chance, right, as moderate Islamists.
So there were people who thought that we should replace the Egyptian military dictatorship with a democratic system if we can. But then what happened with the Arab Spring was not the plan, right? The leak came out and the State Department cables radicalized politics in Tunisia because even though they all knew they lived in a dictatorship, The WikiLeaks had all these stories about the kleptocracy of Ben Ali and how his wife’s family had just gangsterized the entire economy and all this. So he was forced to flee on a plane full of gold bricks to Saudi Arabia.
So people of Egypt were like, holy crap, you can do that? And so in Giza and Alexandria and Cairo and everywhere in between, everybody came out. In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood waited. It was really, I think the liberals, union workers and university types were the first ones really out there.
And the Muslim Brotherhood was more cautious and they came out, but essentially had the entire consensus of all of Egyptian society was now’s our chance to get rid of Hosni Mubarak. And I think it was started out by these groups who’d been supported by the NED. But I think it very quickly got out of hand and was just this is an American back dictator being overthrown now. And in fact, the Obama people panicked and tried to work out a compromise where they would keep Omar Suleiman, who is the head of the secret torture police.
And then but what happened was the the junior officers told the senior officers that we’re not going to fire on this crowd. We’ll kill you guys before we kill them. Believe it. That was it.
Game is up, dude. You guys have to stop. The protesters aren’t going home. So somebody tell the president it’s time for him to go.
And then right around that time, this is like weeks into the thing. And then finally, Barack Obama told them, OK, you got to step down now. And it was because the junior officers were going to mutiny. They weren’t going to clear the square.
So they they and then like like we’re saying before, then they turned right around a year and a half later and they did a military coup and overthrow the overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood, drove them right back out of power. And Mubarak Jr. Fattah al-Sisi is the dictator this day. He held an election where he won with 97 percent in a Saddam Hussein style or You know, Azerbaijan style phony election.
Asbed: Perfect democracy. Scott, I’m going to turn our attention a little bit to Armenia in the neighborhood, because in Provoked, you actually cover how U.S. foreign policy in the 90s was shaped by energy politics in the South Caucasus. You describe how Western oil interests backed the coup in Azerbaijan that brought Haidar Aliyev to power, paving the way for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. I’ll call it the BTC pipeline.
The U.S. aimed to bypass both Russia and Iran while backing Azerbaijan in the first Nagorno-Karabakh war, even facilitating the use of the Mujahideen fighters from Afghanistan and American mercenaries. It’s a kind of a striking example of how big oil and regime change and military intervention intersected early on. So the BTC pipeline was more than an energy project. I’m kind of interested in hearing more about this from you.
What are the broader geopolitical goals behind routing everything through Georgia and Turkey instead of Russia and Iran?
Scott: Well, that’s it. I mean, that’s the answer is to keep that revenue out of the Russians or the Iranians hands. And it’s… this is a very interesting subject.
The, you know, very it’s obscure, I think, you know, most people probably couldn’t tell you where Azerbaijan or Armenia are there, you know, these tiny little countries. um crammed up between a lot of bigger ones and giant bodies of water and all these things very far from here so people might need to pull up a map and see where we’re talking about but so everybody south of the caucasus mountains got to go free from soviet rule in the north they stayed part of the Russian Federation and so Azerbaijan and Armenia fought over Nagorno-Karabakh, which of course you guys call Artsakh there, which was, it’s sort of like for people not familiar, I guess your audience knows, but for people not familiar, it’s essentially like a weird West Berlin type situation where you had this Armenian enclave completely surrounded by Azerbaijan.
And then there’s, of course, this other Azerbaijan enclave that is bisected by Armenia on the other side. Only in modern times.
Asbed: If you go back historically, you’ll see a different story. But yeah, you’re absolutely right.
Scott: Right. So I think it was, what, 30 or 40,000 people were killed in the original war in 1994, somewhere around there. And as you said, they brought in Gulbuddine Hekmatyar and his terrorists from Afghanistan. People know Hekmatyar from being one of the close allies of the Taliban, one of the worst enemies of the United States during our occupation over the last 20 years.
He had also been a CIA favorite back in the 1980s. Because he was one of the most ruthless murderers, just getting people alive, that kind of thing. And then also Richard Secord, who is General Secord famous from Iran-Contra fame. Yeah, he had a group of mercenaries that were brought in as well.
And it was, this wasn’t really a color-coded revolution. It was just a military coup, basically, where… And the British press did a great job of explaining all this. It’s in the London Times and the Telegraph where BP especially led this coup.
And they had, you know, a bunch of MI6 officers were like in the leadership of British Petroleum at the time. And they just bribed some military officers and overthrew the democratically elected president of Azerbaijan, a guy named Elcibey. Yeah. So they overthrew him.
And as you said, they installed Aliyev. And then he… His son took over in, I think, in the early W. Bush years when the father died.
And neither of them ever won a legitimate election in their lives. They just, you know, it started with a military coup and then bogus elections ever since then. Again, just like al-Sisi in Egypt, 97% re-election rate. And then…
In one case, W. Bush, and in the other case, Aliyev himself announced the results of the election before the election. W. Bush goes, man, I’m really looking forward to y’all’s great democratic election, and I’m looking forward to working with you after that, you know?
Hovik: Yeah.
Scott: OK. And then and then Ali of himself did the same thing if you on the next election where they I think they just accidentally announced the results on TV when they held the damn thing yet. It was going to take place the next day. They’re like, oh, well, you know, we’re just practicing.
But. So, yeah, which goes to show that all this crap about spreading democracy is just a ruse for overthrowing countries that aren’t compliant with American wishes. If your absolute authoritarian, hereditary monarchy is in compliance with American goals, then we got no problem. If you’re Aliyev or if you’re Abdullah or Salman in Saudi Arabia or any of these guys, Bin Zayed in UAE or any of these guys, you get to do whatever you want.
Asbed: Yeah, I mean, to a lot of us Armenians, these under the table operations that you’re talking about sound suspiciously like the Iran-Contra scandal, right? Yeah. I mean, we’ve known about it.
Hovik: They even use the same people.
Scott: Yeah, that’s right.
Asbed: Even the same players like the Richard Secords, like you mentioned, and the oil business.
Scott: Well, and by the way, guys, I mean, I think it’s worth bringing up, too, that as you guys well know, there are… uh, humongous Armenian communities in the United States. And as I found out when I lived in LA, but I’ve also, you know, known other Armenians. I have Armenian friends who have told me this, where there are some serious ass enclaves of Armenian Americans all over this country. And I don’t remember which all cities he mentioned, but he mentioned a handful of cities where there are large groups of Armenian American.
Hovik: Yeah. And like,
Scott: And, you know, a pretty close knit, right? Like pretty close knit communities in these different cities across country. My point being that, oh, well, all the Armenians in California cannot change this policy, right? Exactly.
You would think that with all that money and all those votes, highly organized ethnic community here that obviously cares very much about what happens to Armenia back there. There are congressmen. I’ve seen congressmen bow and scrape before the Armenian lobby. I’ve seen, you know, American politicians go to Armenia and claim to support Armenia and all this.
But doesn’t matter. The executive branch, the American empire is on the side of
Asbed: It’s completely oblivious to the people.
Hovik: What’s, I think, unique, and I just want to sort of underscore this, is that there are many Armenians who, you know, living in the diaspora, especially in the U.S. diaspora, are now part of the mainstream sort of, you know, they have bought into the mainstream narrative about the war in Ukraine, and in general, this anti-Russian belief. So they actually genuinely believe that Armenia would be better off with going towards the U.S. than with Russia.
And I think that’s an interesting twist because that’s the liability that diaspora has because you think you have influence, but actually many of these people are influencing Armenia the wrong way, I would say. Not that, I mean, I don’t have a… Either way, I think that Armenians in Armenia should decide their future. But this is the belief that the diaspora can help Armenia.
Maybe it can on some things, but on other aspects, it’s actually used to divide Armenia as well. Yeah, that makes sense. Now, fast forward. Well, wait, wait.
Scott: So go back. Stop for just a second and go back because I didn’t really answer the question about the BTC pipeline here. So so for people, everybody picture the area here or pull up a map. And basically, the deal is this.
We want to make sure that all this Caspian oil and natural gas is transported out of there by American and or European, but especially American companies, and that the Russians and the Iranians get nothing. That’s what’s important, is that the pipelines cannot go through Russia and then on to Europe and they cannot go through Iran. Now, the oil companies wanted to just go through Iran. That would be the easiest way to do it.
And in fact, even Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had egg all over his face from the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis and everything in 79 when he was the national security adviser, all that stuff and a very powerful one at that, all that stuff was blowing up in his face. Well, And just 12 years later, in 1993, he’s working for Unocal and saying, hey, we ought to build a pipeline across Iran. This would be a good opportunity for us to make some money and also to begin to normalize relations with Iran. What are we going to do?
Keep a cold war against them forever or something? That doesn’t make any sense. And Alexander Haig, who had been the secretary of state under… Ronald Reagan and who had been, was Kissinger’s, you know, protege in the Nixon and Ford years.
Alexander Haig also wanted to build a pipeline across Iran. The Israel lobby said, no, the pipeline cannot go across Iran. We cannot normalize relations with Iran. It’s forbidden.
OK, fine. And then there were all different other routes that they were exploring. But the American strategist in the Clinton White House said, no, what we’re doing is we’re going to make But you mentioned the BTC pipeline that’s from Baku, Azerbaijan, through Tbilisi, Georgia, through to Ceyhan, Turkey, and the port on the Mediterranean Sea there. And then the whole point of this pipeline is it runs due west.
And so they like thread the needle, as they put it, between Russia and Iran and really screwed them good. And there’s a whole great series about this in the Washington Post by a guy named Dan Ottaway. And I forget the other one. It’s these two guys, and they wrote like five or eight articles about this stuff.
Asbed: And customer number one of the oil that runs through the BTC is Israel, actually.
Scott: Sure. And of course, even when they’re boycotting Russia, they now got Russian oil being pumped. The Azerbaijanis are reselling Russian oil through the BTC. That’s right.
The whole point was cutting them out. It gets rebranded. Yeah. And then so…
And then this also went to the extent where they’re willing to support the terrorists in Chechnya, especially in the second war. I want to support the terrorists in Chechnya as long as they’re keeping the old Soviet pipeline through Chechnya from being rebuilt. And then when the Russians say, OK, fine, well, we’ll build another new pipeline that just goes through Dagestan and goes around Chechnya. Then the terrorists invade Dagestan.
Hovik: They blew it up. Yeah.
Scott: Yeah. They attack that, too.
Hovik: So,
Scott: I mean, that is the Americans on the side of the Bin Ladenites right up till the end of the, I mean, and even into the 21st century in order to disrupt the Russians, prevent them from having those pipelines through there. It means everything to them. And so, again, like when it comes down to, I mean, there’s no Azerbaijani lobby in America, right? There’s no giant Azerbaijani diaspora in America that has anything like the organized political power and money that Armenians have.
But, oh, well. Yeah. Again, even in fact, as I show in the book, even when Congress appropriated more money to Armenia and and the Russians in the American Congress are both backing Armenia, the empire still backing Azerbaijan. So.
Hovik: We have a lot of questions, so if you ever have to stop, let us know. But I do want to fast forward to 2018 when Nikol Pashinyan came to power. This was also a Western-backed color revolution, in my opinion. It’s not covered and it’s not addressed by some because…
Honestly, no one cares about Armenia probably as much as they do about Georgia, and it’s been one of the less covered things. But since then, Armenia has been steadily distancing itself from Russia, just as US foreign policy toward the region continues to prioritize energy routes and containment over security. And Washington stayed largely silent during Azerbaijan’s 2020 war, for instance. That was during Trump, his first tenure.
And also, of course, in 2023, ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, you know, a few State Department officials said, you know, no more business as usual. But now it’s way more than usual, actually. Business is flowing. Business is good.
So I would say that some would say actually, and I would subscribe to that, that the U.S. not only tolerated Azerbaijan’s recent advances, but that it enabled them. And some, I’m sure in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, including the Israeli lobby types, definitely cheered for the outcome. Because… Well, let’s go to this.
You mentioned this in your book, but in this Rand Corporation report in 2019, Extending Russia, it talks about actually exploiting tensions in the South Caucasus to split Armenia away from… Russia, and the only way you could do that is if you could solve, unfortunately by solve they mean ethnic cleansing and genocide, if you could solve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict or Artsakh conflict. So I want to ask you, we jumped, there was a big time gap between the 1990s and 2018 and onwards. Do you see that the same foreign policy that drove US policy in the 1990s, carrying through to now, today, in 2020 and 2023?
Or has anything changed?
Scott: Yeah, no, I think the only thing that changed really was the extent, right? It was after the American-supported regime change in Armenia in 2019 that the American-supported guy then marginalized. Do I have that right, 19? 2018. Oh, 18.
The so-called Velvet Revolution. That guy marginalized the Russian position in the country, and the Russians had some peacekeepers there in Nagorno-Karabakh, correct? So then the Russians said, fine, oh, you don’t like me no more and pulled their troops out. And then that was all she wrote for Nagorno-Karabakh.
They chose America, but the Americans didn’t put troops in there to prevent Azerbaijan from rolling in. So, you know, it was a major loss for Armenia there for going along with the Americans. And I don’t know what the other side of the argument is of what they supposedly got out of it, but I don’t see much.
Hovik: We don’t either. So those think tank reports, like the RAND Corporation report, I don’t know how much you know about it in detail. Sort of how significant are they in shaping foreign policy? Like people just try to, you know… ignore that and say, well, it’s just one report, but there are other reports, but what is the connection between, I guess, think tanks and foreign policy?
Yeah.
Scott: It depends. I mean, the Rand Corporation was created by the Pentagon. I believe it’s still financed by the Air Force. They put it in Santa Barbara so that it can be somewhat independent from all the East Coast consensus.
But And I have to tell you, I don’t know of any reporting that said where officials confirmed that, yes, they read that report and thought, this is great. Let’s do this. Right. So I don’t know any like hard connection between the Rand report and the policy.
On the other hand, clearly the policy is based on the Rand Report. I’m sorry. It’s just like the McCollum memo of how to provoke Japan into attacking us first from Arthur McCollum, the naval intelligence officer that he wrote in 1941. Well, they implemented his steps A through H in chronological order, right?
Like they clearly based their policy on the McCollum memo. It’s the same thing here. It’s a circumstantial case, but an absolutely convincing one. And for people who haven’t read it, I mean, What can I say?
It’s fantastic. It’ll make your whole weekend, everybody. It’s called Extending Russia from 2019. And what does that mean, extending Russia?
It means overextending Russia. It means causing problems in Russia’s near abroad where they will have to overextend themselves by spending money and time and attention and energy trying to put out these fires. And we can just disrupt them. We can hit them here, here, here, here, here, and here. and give them a giant pain in the ass.
That was what the whole thing was about. So what does that mean? It means provoking them.
Hovik: That’s what it is. It talks about arming Syrian rebels. It talks about giving lethal weapons to Ukraine. It talks about the Arctic.
So all of the things that either happened or are in the process of happening.
Scott: That’s right. And I think it’s really important to note, too, that for every recommendation that they give, including as you just said arming the rebels in Syria that means al-Qaeda guys in the Idlib province held up in the Idlib province, right, the guys who ended up just taking over Damascus last December um as they go through their list of recommendations each one has a giant disclaimer at the bottom disclaimer it says don’t listen to us Warning, if you follow this idiot advice, you’re going to cause horrible things to happen, so don’t. It’s the disclaimer under every recommendation.
They go, you know, we could screw around with the Nord Stream pipeline, but that could cause a reaction from the Germans. They might get mad at us and move even closer to Russia, and the Russians might get pissed off, and it might preclude our ability to negotiate with them about other interests that we have in common that we’re working on. And they say, geez, if we try to overthrow the government of Belarus, Again, we try and fail again. Well, that could cause a war.
Belarus is by far the single most important country to Russia, and they’re not going to tolerate an American regime change in Minsk. And so that might really be more trouble than it’s worth. But you could try it. And then they did that in 2020.
They did another failed coup in Belarus for the third time. They tried no one and no five. And in 20, they did another failed coup against Lukashenko. Then they say you could arm the terrorists in Syria.
But, you know, they are terrorists and that could end up causing a major problem, not just for Assad and Russia and Iran, but for us, too, if we’re to really empower Al Qaeda there. I don’t know about that. And then they say, well, and of course, we could increase arms for the Ukrainians and that could drive up costs for the Russians. Of course, they might decide that the problem in Ukraine has gotten so bad that now they need to go ahead and truly invade with regular ground troops and seize the entire Donbass, which would be very bad for our Ukrainian clients.
It would be very expensive for us and would be a humiliation for us on the international stage as well. So there’s very good reasons not to do that. And then it’s the same thing all the way down the list. Essentially, what the report says is Look, we got paid to write this thing about ways that we could provoke the Russians.
On the other hand, we’re really recommending to you bosses that you don’t follow our advice here. Every one of these things is extraordinarily risky. Yes, it could drive up costs for the Russians. They could absolutely drive up costs for us and our friends as well.
And we might find ourselves regretting doing any of this stuff. So what can you say? You read the thing and you go, yeah, well, that’s what they did. All right.
Asbed: Scott, you may have answered the question that I want to ask you as a final question with all these disclaimers. So as a small country, Armenia, on the periphery of Russia, how should these little countries survive these times geopolitically? They’re just taken for collateral damage in the bigger geopolitical things. So should they just get governments that say, we’re just not gonna do that?
Or what’s your advice on how they can survive this?
Scott: Yeah, I would say maintain your neutrality as best as you can, right? Talk nice to everybody. Go along with as little as you can when major powers are trying to suborn your interests into theirs. And then…
You know, whatever, tread as carefully as you can. It’s something that’s it’s a very unfortunate reality for these minor powers. I think Syria is a great example of this, where even to this day, people say, you know, this is a people’s revolution. This is there are people who are so sick and tired of being tyrannized by the Assad regime, and they’re just protesting for their rights.
And it’s like, yeah, well, tough. So what? It’s basically irrelevant because you know what else is going on? America and Turkey and Israel and Saudi and Qatar and UAE are pouring in billions to support a bunch of head chopping, suicide bombing terrorist maniacs in order to weaken Iran’s position in the region.
So. Your silly parochial little interests don’t really mean anything. Syria has the tough problem of being a small, weak country surrounded by powerful ones who are determined to have their way. And so you might be a Syrian citizen who legitimately hates Assad, but you’re a sock puppet of the CIA now.
So pick very carefully whose side you’re on. You might find that your domestic politics put you on the side, essentially committing treason against your own land in favor of foreign powers. I mean, people accuse me of that for just arguing against my government’s position on these foreign policies, but nobody’s truly threatening us. Right.
Yeah. And I’m not really arguing for any of these other governments positions. It’s just against my own government’s horrible positions on all these things. But if it came down to a situation where there really was like hypothetically a massive tug of war for dominance and power and position in the United States between. say the EU, the Russians and the Chinese for who’s going to dominate American politics more.
Well, then I would be in a much more precarious position and I’d have to pick and choose my political positions very carefully for not just what do I really think, but whose position does my position coincide with and who might I be helping to empower at the expense of my own people? That’s the position that we’re putting Armenians and Syrians and Ukrainians and so many others in.
Asbed: Scott, I hope people are listening to you because we’ve talked to others like Jeffrey Sachs and Larry Johnson and Pascal Lota and this stay neutral message. We’re trying to ram it home, actually.
Scott: Yeah. Well, that’s great. And those are all great guys. Well, the first two, I don’t know the third, but.
Asbed: He actually has a department of neutrality studies. He’s a scholar. Which Japanese university it was? I can’t remember it at this very moment, but.
Scott: I want neutrality for the USA, too. Just because America is so wealthy and powerful doesn’t mean that we need to exercise that power all the time. You know, and it’s clearly the American empire is the worst thing about our society and about our situation domestically. And I saw a really interesting interview.
I like this guy, Matt Walsh. I guess I’m becoming more of a right winger as I grow old. Yeah. Matt Walsh is this cultural conservative, you know, railing against the woke.
And Tucker Carlson interviewed him the other day. And they had this whole little, you know, little part of their discussion about, like, why should foreign policy matter so much to Americans anyway? It seems so, so… So negative and regretful to think that like on the right, we now have this giant fight over Israel, Palestine and dividing the MAGA movement over Israel, Palestine, when that should be such a peripheral interest to the American people.
But the thing of it is, and they’re right about that. I don’t want to have a dog in that fight. But the whole thing is we do have a dog in the fight. It’s the same with all of this stuff.
Why should the American people care about foreign policy? One, they shouldn’t at all have to. But they do have to because America is the world empire. And it is a terrible irony because our ancestors are the people who fled the old world.
So they could just come here and be free, mind their own business, leave other people alone and be left alone. Running from empire. That’s right. And yet America is the most powerful country in the history of the world and exercises that authority mercilessly.
And as the great advocate of the American empire, William Buckley said, the American people will just have to tolerate a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores. in order to protect us from all the foreign enemies, in that case, the Soviet commies and the Cold War. But whatever. It’s the permanent crisis, the permanent emergency, and the world empire necessitates an all-powerful domestic empire to keep… The country in line so that it can be its resources can be marshaled to wage the world empire.
When, in fact, if we didn’t have a world empire, we find that we don’t really need Washington, D.C. very much at all. It wouldn’t just be the Department of Education would be the Department of Everything would be being dismantled right now. We really don’t need him at all. And we could have. you know, representative democracy on the state level where the people’s voices might actually, you know, have a say in policy whatsoever, where in in national politics, we don’t and clearly in foreign policy.
And I’ve had the most expert experts agree with me with a shrug like there’s just no argument. The Israelis and the Turks and the British and the Saudis have a hell of a lot more to do with determining American foreign policy than the American people. That’s right. We’re not even considered.
We’re here just to be the taxpayers and the fathers of the soldiers to go and fight in the thing. They’re going to have a committee meeting where the Brits and the Saudis and the Israelis decide who Americans should attack next. And their think tanks and George Soros and all of these guys have nothing to do with the people of this country at all, have no allegiance to the people of this country at all. They get to decide what we’re going to do while the American people only find out later.
Hovik: Scott, thank you. This was a very interesting discussion and we didn’t even get to cover Iran or any, a lot of other things that we want to talk about. But I think it’s, you know, we need a break. I think you need a break.
This was, you know, your energy is very admirable. So Scott is the author of Provoked. Sorry. Yeah, Provoked, I guess it’s.
Asbed: Yeah, it’s hard to see.
Hovik: Well, it’s out of focus.
Scott: Hold it back.
Asbed: We’ll have a link in the show notes.
Scott: There you go. Thank you both very much for having me. It’s been great.
Asbed: Thank you, Scott. We’ll talk to you again.
Scott: Absolutely. Y’all have a great night.
Asbed: Take care.
Hovik: Take care. So we’ve been talking with Scott Horton, an American radio host, author, and prominent voice in the libertarian anti-war movement. He is the editorial director of the Libertarian Institute, as well as antiwar.com. And he’s the host of the Scott Horton Show, where he has conducted thousands of interviews with experts on foreign policy, war, and civil liberties.
He also hosts anti-war radio on 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles. For more information on all of us, including Scott Horton, you can go to podcasts.groong.org slash episode-number. And I believe this is episode 433. I’m Hovik Manucharyan, temporarily in Los Angeles.
Asbed: And I’m Asbed Bedrossian, also in Los Angeles. Please find us on social media. You know where to find our links. Please COMMENT, LIKE, and SHARE our shows with your friends.
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Thanks for listening. We’ll talk to you soon.
Hovik: Bye-bye.